Contention and Other Frontier Stories Read online

  Marcia Gaye writes poetry, prose, memoir, and songs. She is published in many genres. Her work has won numerous awards, including first, second, and third prizes for the Showcase Award from Ozark Creative Writers. She has lived all across the United States, collecting characters and stories along the way, and currently resides in St. Charles, Missouri, with her husband, Jim.

  THE MEDICINE ROBE

  BY MICHAEL ZIMMER

  The government man shoved his chair back from the kitchen table and stood. Rémi knew he was still watching him. Staring down at the top of his head, waiting. The government man’s uncertainty hung in the air between them like the ticking seconds following a heated argument, but there had been no harsh words. Only silence. That and Rémi’s refusal to acknowledge the government man’s demands, to even lift his eyes to meet the younger man’s gaze.

  Let him stew, Rémi thought. Let him wonder if he was getting through to this old mixed-blood hunter with the wrinkled skin and wild white hair and arthritic knuckles, a relic from a time so far in the past it probably didn’t even seem real to a government man not yet out of his twenties.

  After a minute, the government man cleared his throat. Rémi tried to remember what he’d called himself when he knocked at the cabin’s front door shortly after noon, but the name eluded him. It didn’t matter. His message had been clear enough.

  “Do you understand?” the government man persisted, repeating a question he’d already asked half a dozen times. “You have to move.”

  “Yes,” Rémi finally relented in a voice that rumbled from deep within his broad chest. “I understand.”

  “I hate that it has to be this way, but we’ve already started construction and we’ll be moving in this direction by the end of the week.”

  Rémi nodded and continued to stare at the kitchen table’s scarred top. But he understood. He had watched the bulldozers move in last week, less than a musket ball’s flight from his front porch. Their grating roar and the stench of their exhaust, the shouts of men in hard hats and the whine of cables, were an incessant reminder of what approached. What awaited him no matter where he went.

  Glancing around at the cabin’s sparse furnishings, the government man said, “Do you have anyone to help you move?”

  “I won’t need anyone,” Rémi replied. Then he stood abruptly, joints cracking, and came around the table, and the government man backed away.

  “You should go now,” Rémi said in a voice that belied his years, and the government man nodded and looked relieved.

  “Yes, I’ll do that.”

  Picking his briefcase up off the floor, the government man started for the door. Then his gaze fell on the tattered robe draped across the top of Rémi’s old wooden trunk and he stopped.

  “That’s . . .”

  He paused as if searching for a word that wouldn’t offend.

  “Large?” Rémi supplied.

  “Yes, very,” the government said and gave a short, half-embarrassed laugh. “You were a buffalo hunter, right? Back in the old days.” He didn’t wait for confirmation. “Is that a buffalo robe?”

  “It is a grizzly bear’s robe,” Rémi replied.

  “Grizzly bear? I thought your people—the Métis, is it?—hunted buffalo east of here, in the Dakotas.”

  “My people, the Bois Brûlé of the Red River Valley, hunted buffalo wherever the buffalo were. But the grizzly was killed on Lakota land.”

  At the government man’s puzzled expression, Rémi added, “The Dakotas.”

  “I’ve never heard of grizzly bears in the Dakotas.”

  “Now you have,” Rémi replied, then pointed to the door. “You should go now. I have much to think about.”

  “Yes, of course. You know about the new town of Fort Peck that we’re building north of the old town, don’t you? If you have any questions, I have an office there. Anyone can tell—”

  “I won’t have any questions,” Rémi interrupted, and the government man nodded and left without further comment.

  Standing in the cabin’s door, Rémi watched him drive away in a carriage without horses and thought that Old Joe, who had died many years earlier, had been wrong in his belief that the automobiles of the white men would someday vanish, and that the buffalo would come back to replace them. Rémi had known even then that the great herds would never return, but he’d held out hope that the automobiles would eventually disappear, allowing the return of the horse and the ox.

  When the dust of the government man’s auto began to settle, Rémi moved back into the cool dimness of the cabin’s interior and shut the door, muting the sound of heavy equipment tearing at the soil downstream. The government that the government man said he represented was going to build a dam downstream from his cabin, and when it was completed, Rémi Caron’s home would sink from sight beneath the surface of progress.

  The first eviction notice had come six months ago. Others, too many to count, had followed. They had made fine starters for his morning fires. But now there would be no more notices. Now the government man insisted if Rémi did not leave of his own will, he would return with sheriffs and guns and move him out by force.

  On creaky knees, Rémi shuffled back to his chair behind the kitchen table. He tested his coffee with a callused finger and was pleased to discover it was still warm. Wrapping his hands around the tin mug, Rémi sat back to contemplate his options. They seemed few and bleak, and he wondered how it had come to this, that he should allow a government man barely able to raise a scrawny mustache to dictate his future.

  His eyes roamed the cabin and the memories it generated, and in time they settled on the grizzly bear robe, as they always did. A smile broke through the grim countenance of his face. The hide was old and had been with him since his youth. Its hair was slipping now, and the once supple leather had turned nearly as stiff as rawhide. Probably to someone like the government man, it looked shabby and worthless, but Rémi knew its value. So had Old Joe, before the cancer took him.

  Closing his eyes, Rémi let the currents in his mind take him back to the day he’d killed the giant beast.

  The day he had become a man in the eyes of the Bois Brûlé.

  They had left their homes in the Red River Valley in June for the summer hunt, pushing southwest onto the wild, rolling plains north of the Missouri River in search of the buffalo they hunted not only for their own sustenance, but for the meat and robes they would take north into the Grandmother’s land to sell to the forts of the Hudson’s Bay Company. More than two hundred men, women, and children accompanying nearly a hundred infamous Red River carts—greaseless axles squalling like lost souls, the dust rising thick overhead, oxen bawling, children laughing, the men pushing ahead on their best buffalo runners. Everyone eager and excited in spite of the dangers they would inevitably face as they ventured into the homeland of the Sioux.

  Among them had ridden Rémi Caron. All of fourteen summers that year and determined to prove himself worthy of the title of Bois Brûlé—the people of the burnt wood—named for the dark color of their flesh.

  The buffalo had been elusive that year, and the hunters’ rambling search had taken them farther west than they had ever before traveled. It was in their second month that they crossed the Missouri, coming in time to the mauvaises terres, the badlands, where the Little Missouri flowed north into the Mother River.

  In his mind’s eye, Rémi saw the barren, lifeless knobs and ridges of the badlands take shape before him, as real as the growl of tractors beyond his door. He saw the valleys, little more than deep, broad coulees twisting like something in pain, and bands of tinted earth that seemed too perfect in their mutations to be natural.

  The caravan had stopped at the eastern edge of the badlands to make camp. The next day was Sunday, a time to rest and worship for those who wished, or to hunt and explore for those too young and wayward to slow down.

  Rémi had been among the restless ones. Filled with a young man’s boundless energy, he and some of the other youths of
the camp had ridden into the badlands to explore its wonders. They rode their wild-maned ponies with the ease of natural horsemen, born to the flat, buffalo hair−padded saddles the Métis preferred, laughing and telling stories, and once in a while mentioning this girl or another who traveled under the watchful eyes of their mothers.

  It was in a wide, flat-bottomed valley several miles into the badlands that they dismounted to smoke their pipes, while their ponies grazed on the rich grass carpeting its floor. Rémi had been riding a handsome gray stallion his father had purchased the winter before, but which was still too young and undisciplined to be a runner, a mount trained to take its rider into the midst of a stampeding herd of bison. To bring him close alongside the surging buffalo until the hunter could empty his smooth-bored musket into the animal’s lungs.

  It was the gray that scented the bear first. He threw his head up and whinnied loudly, his small ears perked toward the far end of the valley. Rémi immediately dropped the clay pipe he had been loading with tobacco and scrambled to his feet, pulling his musket up to check the priming. The others followed his example, and one of them, he couldn’t remember who, had whispered, “Sioux!” in an awed tone. But Rémi knew it wasn’t their age-old enemies who lurked nearby. The gray wouldn’t have reacted so violently to another human’s presence.

  All the ponies had their heads up now, nostrils extended as they sucked in the scent of approaching danger. Rémi quickly bridled the gray and swung into the saddle without using his stirrups. Mounted, they all felt a little braver. When the bear finally lumbered out of a distant draw, their relief was almost overpowering. It was a sow, they would discover later, the first grizzly any of them had ever seen. Too young to remember when grizzlies had roamed the Hair Hills bordering their Red River Valley homelands, they knew only what the elders of their villages told them of the giant bears’ swiftness and ferocity.

  Some of the older men, the better hunters—and for that reason the ones they admired most—sometimes used summer bearskins as sunshades over their carts. Such skins were considered a coup, a badge honoring their skill and courage.

  “Let’s kill him,” Rémi had urged tautly.

  The others instantly agreed. Only Louis Girard voiced caution.

  “We can’t rush it,” he said.

  “Why not?” Rémi demanded.

  “You’ve heard the same stories I have. A grizzly can outrun a horse, and it can kill one as easily as a fox kills a rabbit.”

  “We’re not rabbits,” Joseph Demer taunted, and the others laughed and mocked Louis for his cowardice. Only Rémi remained silent, absorbing his friend’s warning without comment. Of them all, he knew Louis best, and he knew Louis was not afraid of the bear. But he was smart, and that was why Rémi listened.

  “How do we do it?” Etienne Bouchard asked.

  “Carefully,” was Louis’s advice, and Rémi quickly seconded it.

  By now their ponies were moving nervously under them, sensing the boys’ fever but also growing more frightened as the bear ambled in their direction. At Rémi’s command they spread out to begin their advance, five young men reaching for manhood. Four of them carried ancient smoothbores, the fifth only a bow with a dozen iron-tipped arrows. Their ponies balked when the boys tried to force them forward, but they had been horsemen even then, and kept the animals in check. The great bear came on in her lazy, rolling gait, her nose dipping into the tall grass every few feet. Rémi knew that, like buffalo, a bear’s eyesight was poor at best, and with caution they managed to get within eighty yards of her before one of the horses whinnied and caught the bear’s attention. Rising deliberately to her rear legs, front paws hanging down and toward the center of her massive body, the great bear sniffed the air suspiciously, then issued a warning grunt—a sharp wagh that caused two of the ponies to go berserk.

  Rémi’s gray wheeled and tried to bolt, but he sawed back on the reins and kicked the side of the stallion’s neck with his moccasined foot until he forced the skittish mount around. The bear was still on her hind legs, still snuffling and squinting almost comically in their direction. Her massive frame tapped some of Rémi’s enthusiasm. He had expected something smaller, closer in size to a black bear. Even in the shade of the sow’s belly, he could see the long curve of her claws, the rippling muscles of her legs, and he knew what she was capable of. His father’s voice came belatedly, a warning issued almost casually some weeks before they pulled out for the buffalo range.

  “They are the offspring of the devil, boy. Meaner than a moose and faster than my best buffalo runner. If you see one, ride the other way.”

  Rémi knew he should, but something within him, some vague sense of invulnerability, refused to let him flee. The gray was nearly crazed with fear, tossing his head and fighting the bit, but Rémi resolutely held him back.

  “Let’s go, Rémi,” Simon Quesnelle pleaded, and there was no longer any mockery in his voice. His eyes were wide, his mount near to bolting.

  “No, I’ll stay,” Rémi replied stubbornly.

  “Only a fool would stand against such a creature,” Etienne Bouchard insisted.

  Rémi remained unswayed. He tried to force the gray closer, but it seemed a hopeless task. For every step gained, the gray would take one sideways or half a dozen back before Rémi could get him stopped. It was the bear that started to close the gap between them, coming forward on her hind legs, nose wrinkling as she tested the air. At fifty yards she suddenly waghed again and slapped the air with a short, powerful swing of her forearm—a warning, Rémi knew, and his scalp crawled.

  The gray threw its head up, almost smacking Rémi in his face, and backed off rapidly; it wheeled and danced and raised a cloud of dust in the grass until he and the bear were again separated by nearly eighty yards. It was then that Rémi discovered he was alone, that the others had either made a run for safety or been unable to control their mounts. He should have felt fear. Instead he felt, suddenly and inexplicably, wonderful. Like a warrior with every nerve ending drawn to the surface and set tingling. He and the gray and the giant bear, a dragon from his father’s storybooks waiting to be slain, an enemy conquered. And he thought, too, of the young women in camp and how they would look at him when he returned with the bloodied robe. The valley was his arena, the bear his trial; lifting the musket, he sighted down its long barrel and squeezed off his shot.

  The grizzly woofed and slapped at her belly as if stung. Rémi saw the puff of dust erupt from the lighter colored hair covering her stomach and knew his shot had been good, if not exactly true. He wedged the musket’s butt between his foot and the stirrup and hitched his powder horn around, filling the antler-tip measure as he blew his moist breath down the barrel to extinguish any lingering sparks. He poured the powder down the barrel as the bear dropped to all fours, unmoving yet, her head held low in pain. The gray had skipped back another twenty paces or so and now stood trembling and taut. Rémi capped the musket’s muzzle with a thin square of antelope leather and placed a thumb-sized lead ball over that. He quickly skated the musket’s metal ramrod free of the thimbles holding it under the barrel and rammed the patched ball home. He filled the musket’s huge pan with a finely ground powder from the flattened priming horn he carried in his shooting bag and closed the frizzen.

  Then he waited. Waited until the grizzly finally lifted her head and started forward, abandoning her former swaying shuffle for a trot. The gray tossed its head and started to back away. He sensed the change in the sow’s attitude. So did Rémi. The grizzly was coming toward them now with a deadly deliberateness.

  At fifty yards Rémi again raised his musket, sighted as best he could from the saddle of the nearly frantic gray, and fired. The ashen cloud of powder smoke obstructed his view for several seconds. Then the breeze swept it clear and he saw the bear lunging to her feet, her right foreleg sheened with blood. With a terrible snarl, the grizzly began to lope toward them, and the gray took the bit in his teeth and fled while Rémi hauled back uselessly on the reins.


  Behind them, the bear increased its pace as well, running effortlessly despite her wounds. Panic swelled in Rémi’s breast, squeezing until he felt he couldn’t breathe, and at last he gave the gray its head and let him run.

  Within a quarter mile, the valley pinched down to a sandy draw, its steep walls U-shaped, the dirt soft and crumbling. It was the same draw they had followed coming in, and he saw the tracks the others had made leaving, the loose soil churned darker than the red-hued dirt around it. It was a twisting route, he recalled, its banks low enough in places to put a horse over the top if he wanted to. Rémi considered it, attempting to hide rather than try to outrun the wounded grizzly. But instinct screamed for him to run, and he did as it commanded.

  In time the winding draw would lead to the plains, and the Bois Brûlé camp only a few hundred yards from its mouth, but the bear was gaining rapidly. Even wounded, it was obvious she was faster than the gray. Bent low above the gray’s neck, Rémi imagined he could hear the angry, snuffling breath of the wounded animal. Often she was within sight when the draw straightened for brief periods. He tried to gauge her speed, to match it against the distance yet to be covered, and knew it was too far. They would never make it.

  Rounding a bend, Rémi saw the south bank of the draw swoop low, the land sloping upward beyond, rising toward a series of broken, spiny knobs with passable ridges between, and he jerked savagely at the reins. The horse took the bank in a single, terrified leap, but its rear hooves snagged the lip, slipping in the loose dirt and sliding back. Rémi shouted and lashed the gray with the ends of his reins. The stallion’s rear hooves churned in the loose soil. Then the grizzly appeared. Spotting the gray just yards ahead, it lunged forward. The gray squealed in terror and kicked clumsily over the top of the bank just as the bear pounced. Above the gray’s shrill whinny, Rémi heard the wet, ripping sound of torn flesh. Glancing back as the gray stumbled away from the bear’s blow, he saw a swath of shredded hide on the stallion’s hip, the torn flesh raw and furrowed, running blood. The grizzly was only a few feet away but still at the bottom of the draw. She had one bloody paw upraised yet, and her lips were pulled back to reveal huge teeth, yellowed near the base, a fury of pain and rage in her small, piggish eyes. She wanted to kill, Rémi saw, and began to beat at the gray’s croup with the barrel of his musket.