Wilderness Roger Zelazny and Gerald Hausman ONE COLTER In 1808 a mountain man named John Colter ran one hundred and fifty miles, half-naked, while pursued by several hundred Blackfoot warriors. Three Forks, Autumn 1808 John Colter, the man the Crows had nicknamed Seek-heeda, White Eyebrows, knew that he was in a tight spot. Why else would the little hairs at the back of his neck stand straight? He craned his neck, listened. Downstream, the wren that only moments before had been trilling in the choke-cherries, stopped in midsong. Perhaps, he thought, I have gone too far. This was saying a lot for John Colter, the man who had hunted and blazed trails for Lewis and Clark. The man, who, it was said, had gone farther into the unexplored mountains of the Western Rockies than any man alive. He had single-handedly discovered the stinking springs of Yellowstone, the place the old-timers were now calling Colter's Hell and the year before, along with a small band of Flatheads and Crows, he'd almost been killed in these dark thickets. The Blackfeet had pinned them down and pummeled them. Colter took a lead ball in his right leg and had to limp back to camp. But he was alive?though, now, he wasn't exactly sure why. Just behind Colter, in the river where the two men had set their beaver traps, was his friend, John Potts. He could hear him, clunking around. Far off in the hazy depths of the firs, he heard a magpie's comic shriek, but it was suddenly cut off. Potts didn't hear it, or if he did, wasn't much impressed, for he continued clunking. Colter, sensing danger, came out of the copse of willow where he had been listening. It came like muffled thunder from the ridge above the fir tops. "Buffler?" Potts called dreamily from the stream. Colter didn't bother to answer. He saw them pouring down the ravine, maybe a thousand Blackfoot runners?perhaps the whole tribe. In a couple minutes, he and Potts were surrounded. "Will ye look how many warriors come't'fetch ol' Seek-heeda's head?" Potts remarked, dismally. Then, as a hundred bows were raised at him, Potts stubbornly reached for his rifle. There was a singing of feathers, Potts sagged to his knees, stumbled, said: "John, I'm dead," and dropped into the stream without another word. Colter knew what would come next. He surveyed the faces, the hawk-feathers dancing in the sunlight, the black rivers of loose hair, the old, the tired and the new men cleanly arrayed in deerskin and trader's cloth, blanketed and banded and breech-clouted. There were, indeed, a lot of them. Not as many as he had first feared, but what did it matter. There were certainly enough to torture him to death, which was what he knew they were going to do. The man who stepped forward looked like a shaman. His hair was pulled into a topknot on his head. On the crest of the topknot was a raven's head that bobbed when the man moved. He had the usual scarification?loops and ridges across his naked chest, whorls of knife-point artistry. Colter held perfectly still as the shaman's knife played upon his own deer pants and shirt. A few simple swipes of the blade and Colter felt the cool autumn air on his skin. The shaman had shorn him of clothes, but left him a semblance of breech-clout at the groin: the shortened remains of his pants. To Colter this was a clue to his survival. Leaving him his dignity meant that something out of the ordinary was about to happen. In the Crow tongue, the shaman asked Colter if he could run. Colter shook his head. Then the man took a slice of Colter's breast muscle. A small flap of skin came loose, and with it a gush of blood. There was an astonished sound, the release of many breaths, among the gathered men. Then voices raised in wonder. "I have blood," Colter said in Crow, "just like you." "I see," the shaman said, but his eyes made no reference to it. "You will run," he said. "When?" Colter asked. "Now," the man said, "go, now!" The feather-haired men, knowing the race was about to begin, fanned back, making room, as Colter leaned forward and began to sprint. His speed, even at the outset, surprised him. He dashed like a yellow deer out into the white meadow beside the river where his friend lay dead. Colter was eighty yards out when he heard the simultaneous thud of blankets being thrown to the ground and the flapping of buckskin as the runners removed their leggings. He was two hundred yards out when the ground seemed to tremble with the footfalls of the warriors. He dared not turn, for it would slow him down. Instead, he opened his stride so much that, in effect, he was running to keep up with his feet. Colter knew the foolishness of it all: The longer he ran, the longer the Blackfeet would torture him once they caught him. This was a principle of honor, not a gesture of evil. But surely, he thought, I cannot hope to keep up such a pace. Yet a part of him thought that he could; the wild man, who on a dare, had traveled five hundred miles, alone, in the middle of winter. Hustling through the jumbled and tumbled, snow-riven peaks carrying a pack of awls, beads, vermilion, needles, knives and tobacco to trade with the tribes. Running against the Mandan, Hidatsa and Ab-sarokas, he'd often come out the winner. The previous winter, however, his friend Edward Rose had not been so lucky: He'd lost most of his nose, bitten off in a brawl, and his forehead bore the ugly brand where a warrior had burned him with a flaming pine knot. It was Rose who had shown Colter how to run barefoot, how to feign a limp like a hurt rabbit, and then, when the other runner sought to pass, break his spirit with a long, powerful stride. Colter's passion for privation was already legend. A scribe with Lewis and Clark called him "the double of Daniel Boone." Colter snorted at the thought of it. If double to anyone, it was Micajah, his Scotch grandfather from Ireland, who, back in Stuart's Draft, Virginia, had given the faith that when you salted a bird's tail, you could always catch him. The birds, Micajah said, were no less his own kind than the bears, the wolves, or the native Indians. He felt it rising higher in his chest, the burn. The first sign of exhaustion. His feet were covered with the silver fur of prickly pear spines, which lay about the dry meadow grass. The thunder behind him had begun to soften, so that he heard the rivers of feet resounding far away, punctuated, every so often, by the runners nearest him. These were the fastest. He chanced a quick over-the-shoulder glance, saw three lean men just behind. Then, back of them, a tawny cloud of sun-smoke, the seven hundred. He had, anyway, put some space between himself and the greater number of the tribe. But, as he well knew, even this could be a trick. Sometimes they sent the sprinters out first. This way, like wolves on a hunt, when the fastest fell back, the deer was too tired to outrun the rest of the pack. Colter knew that to outlast the pain, he must drive the leanest, hard-muscled men into the ground, must make them think, always, that he had more in him than they had. Usually in a race, he'd come behind the front runner, taking advantage of his wind drag. Then, when the time came, he took him out, smoking past him like a brush fire from Hell. Once in the lead, Colter augmented his hellish pace, upgrading it into a vicious sprint. This would go on for half a mile or more, as long as it took to grind down the bones of his pursuer. As long as he'd lived, he'd won. Meriwether Lewis once said of him, "Colter's never had to draw a second wind. Maybe he hasn't got one." But here on the Jefferson Fork, running for his life, John Colter had no choice. It was the second wind, or the wind of death. He was a mile into it, keeping his lead of about a hundred yards. The three were not going to break, Colter knew that now. They were elbow to elbow, running like antelope. He saw them, or imagined he did, in back of his head: the sinewy grace, the Indian stride that knows no end. He, on the other hand, was well ahead?but not by the margin he required to break their pursuit, or their spirit. They were coming on hard, and they knew it, but they would wait for the right time to press him. Right now, they were studying his shoulders and back, searching his legs for any weakness, any small faltering move. Colter, desperately in need of a trick, felt his fading stamina, the metal taste in his mouth, the bell of his heart, the burn boiling up in his chest. He was, he knew, going much too fast. Yet he could not slow down and still hope to live. If anything, he had to work the runners harder, push them out of that long-legged Indian lope, make them know he wasn't going to tire. From a Mandan runner he once learned the trick of fixing the eye on a distant ridge, keeping it there until all else shrank from view. The fusion of leafy gold, the great cottonwoods by the river juncture, now became Colter's compass. On these huge overarching trees, he merged his mind, and the fire of their October leaves became the sole content of his brain. Thus focused, he forged on with renewed speed. The warriors noticed Colter's fresh-seeming gait. From where they ran, their bodies shining with sweat, they saw the tall white man beginning to gain ground. A moment before, the lead man thought they were going to close the distance: Colter looked tired, his shoulders were starting to sag. But now this one saw there was more fight in him than he supposed. Colter had stepped up into a second-winded sprint of madness. He was actually pulling ahead. The lead man, so as not to lose him, opened his stride. And his companions, hanging doggedly at his elbow, started to fade. No man can run that way for long, the lead to...
widez2