Barbara Hambly [Benjamin Janu The Shirt on His Back (v5.0) (e

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.Ivy and Wallach employed about six trappers full-time and some fifty engagés, who for a hundred dollars a year ranged the streams and rivers of the wilderness that stretched from the Missouri to the Pacific hunting beaver.This wage was paid in credit, and they spent this – and more besides – in the company tent.But the rendezvous camp also included independents, who had had enough money to outfit themselves and sold their skins to one company or another by the pound.These were the men who came to see what Gil Wallach was offering, and what he wanted for his wares.And, they came to talk.Inside that first hour, January discovered that the thing the trappers wanted most to do at rendezvous – besides get blue-blind drunk and roger their brains out at Mick Seaholly’s liquor tent in the AFC camp – was to talk.To tell tall stories.To trumpet their pristinely uninformed opinions about what President Van Buren (‘It is Van Buren, ain’t it, now?’) should be doing to fix things back in the States.To brag of their exploits in the mountains, in the deserts, on roaring rivers in flood or of how they’d triumphed over a whole encampment of Crow Indians in the competitive swallowing of raw buffalo entrails, waugh!(Waugh indeed, reflected January.)To hear their own voices – and the voices of others like themselves – after eleven months of hunting prey that would flee at the sound of an indrawn breath and leave them hungry or at least beaver-less that day.Fortunately, it was one of January’s greatest pleasures to hear people who knew what they were talking about talk about their work.Inside that first hour at the store tent, he heard endless comparisons of the relative merits of French and British gunpowder, discussions of the proper ways of dealing with Mexican authorities if you happened to find yourself a little farther south than you’d counted on, discourses on how to locate water in the arid stretches that lay between the western mountains, or where the beaver could still be found as thick and populous as they’d been ten years ago.(‘Say, Prideaux, is it true that Cree squaw of Clem Groot’s showed Groot where there’s a secret valley where the beaver’s the size of baby bears? You should see the pelts Groot brought in.’)Indians came as well.As a child, January had played with the children of the local Houmas and Natchez bands, who occasionally camped on his master’s land, but even then he’d known that they were only the broken remnant of the people they once had been.Since crossing the frontier, he had found himself in the world of the Indians, where the tribes and nations were still strong.Shaw’s little party had travelled from Independence along the Platte with a trading caravan bound for Santa Fe, for protection against the Pawnee, who still held sway on those endless grasslands, and here at the rendezvous a dozen tribes and peoples were represented: Crows and Snakes keeping company mostly with the trappers who worked for the AFC, Flatheads and Nez Perce camped around the Hudson’s Bay tents, alliances mirroring the ancestral enmities of the plains.There were Shoshone and Mandan, Sioux and Omaha.There was even a bunch of Delaware Indians, who had fled the ruin of their people on the east coast two generations ago, to take up a sort of vassalage with the Company as scouts – ‘I’ll take you down there tomorrow, hoss, they got a squaw does nuthin’ but sew moccasins, an’ she can fix you up a new pair for fifty cents in twenty minutes.’January had filled pages of Rose’s notebook with jottings of their characteristic designs of war shirts or tipis, and with unsifted gossip about this tribe or that.Despite the fact that it was, as January well knew, completely illegal for white men to sell liquor to any Indian, when the tall Crow in their beaded deerskin shirts came with their packs of close-folded beaver skins, Gil Wallach shared several tin cups of watered-down forty-rod with them before negotiations began as to price.When they came into the store tent later – with the variously-colored ‘plew’ sticks that represented credit for pelts – January was given to understand that a water bottle filled with liquor was to be quietly set out behind the tent for them as part of the deal.Other traders weren’t so discreet.As the afternoon progressed, tribesmen in all degrees of serious inebriation came and went along the path or across the green open meadow to the west: shouting-drunk, singing-drunk, howling-drunk, weeping-drunk, men who had little experience with the raw alcohol doled out by the traders, and none whatsoever in how and when to stop.One man staggered out of the trees, naked except for his moccasins, and began a reeling dance with his arms spread to the sky; Hannibal emerged from the tent beside January, asked, ‘I never got like that, did I?’‘Every night [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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