Into the Unknown

Chapter Eight

Of all the ways to die, being slain by a badger has to qualify as unique.

I braced for the sensation of its fangs tearing my flesh and the warm gout of blood that would ensue. But suddenly the badger seemed to fly off me and swing around in midair. Then I saw that Zach had hold of its rear legs and had torn it off me. He released his hold, and the badger hit the ground with a thud and rolled.

I feared Zach had hurt it, but the animal was up in the blink of an eye. It snarled and hissed, then whirled and vanished down its hole with a speed that belied its size.

“Well,” I said, for lack of anything better. Zach picked up his rifle and turned to me. “You saved my life. I thank you.”

Zach simply stared.

“Say something,” I prompted.

“You are an idiot.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me,” Zach said. “You nearly got yourself killed, and for what? To spare an animal that was out to kill you? If that’s not being an idiot, I don’t know what is.”

“Really, now,” I said, offended.

“Try that stunt with a grizzly or a mountain lion, and I will bury what is left of you and laugh when I do it.”

“I would never get that close to either,” I responded indignantly. “I am not entirely without common sense.”

“A thimbleful isn’t much to brag about.” Zach squatted. “Let’s take a look at you.”

It was not as bad as it looked. My sleeve was ripped, but my wrist had been spared. Both shins were bloody and my pants torn, but the bites were not all that deep, and the bleeding had about stopped. “See?” I said, wincing. “I’ll live. There was no call to kill it.”

Zach was bent over my right leg, examining the wound. “I don’t like the looks of this one.”

“I will be in pain for a few days, but I will be fine,” I said. “It is not as if a couple of bites will kill me.”

“That’s just it,” Zach said. “They can.”

“I have been bitten before. It is nothing to get excited about.”

“Maybe not back East where there are plenty of doctors to tend you. But out here”—Zach gestured to encompass the wilderness—“just about any wound can land you in the grave.”

“Posh and poppycock,” I declared.

Zach regarded me much as you might regard a wayward child. “Evidently no one ever told you.”

“Told me what?” I was sure he was trying to put a scare into me for my insisting he spare the badger.

“About what kills more folks than anything else. It’s not guns or bows or lances or knives. It’s not claws or fangs or talons. It is the infection that sets in.”

“You exaggerate, sir.”

“For every man who dies of a bullet to the brain or the heart, nine more die from being shot in the leg or the arm. For every warrior who goes down from an arrow or a lance to a vital organ, nine more die from minor wounds. The cause is always the same. The blood turns foul.” Zach indicated my shins. “I’ve seen worse bites than these, sure. But that’s not the point. Even the smallest bite can become infected, and if it does, you’re as good as dead.”

He was so greatly in earnest that I grew alarmed. “You are serious? You are not pulling my leg?”

Zach surprised me by placing a hand on my shoulder. “I would never joke about a thing like this. We need to clean and bandage you, and pray to high heaven the rot in that badger’s mouth did not get into your blood.”

“The rot?” I repeated.

“All meat eaters have bits of rotting flesh between their teeth from the critters they have fed on. That’s what mixes with your blood and turns it putrid.”

Genuine fear washed through me. “I didn’t realize,” I said, my mouth going dry as the implications sank in.

“Most newcomers don’t.” Zach slipped an arm around me and assisted me in rising. He smiled in encouragement. “So long as you don’t come down with a fever, you won’t have anything to worry about.”

All night I tossed and turned. I was so hot, I was caked with sweat. I told myself it was because of my blankets, and toward morning I cast them off.

Zach was up before the sun rose and immediately came to my side. He saw I was awake. “How are you feeling?” he asked, pressing a palm to my brow.

“Tired, but otherwise fine.”

“You have a fever.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean I am infected,” I said. But I knew. I was just being pigheaded.

Zach went to one of his parfleches and rummaged inside. “My mother packed some herbs for me. She has considerable skill as a healer.”

“Herbs?” I said skeptically.

“Indians have cures for all sorts of ailments. Pine gum for boils. Sagebrush leaves for indigestion. Elderberry roots for inflammation.” Zach brought out a packet tied with twine and set it down. “A lot of their cures, the white man doesn’t know about.”

“Are there herbs in there that will help me?”

Zach began undoing the twine. “What the Shoshones call unda vich quana. It will fight the infection. Then there is a tea I can make to bring down your fever.”

“You are going to a lot of trouble on my account,” I remarked.

“Would you rather die?”

All that day I lay feverish and sweating. Zach applied poultices to my shins and made me drink a cup of tea every hour or so. I felt awful, slowing us up this way, but it could not be helped. I was too weak to ride.

That night I was worse. I hardly remember any of it except that I was constantly sweating and constantly shivering. How you can be hot and cold at the same time is a mystery, but I was. By morning I was so helpless, Zach had to tilt a tin cup to my lips to get the tea into me.

About the middle of the afternoon the fever broke. I became aware of the blue of the sky and white pillowy clouds and of the breeze on my face. I smelled my own sweat and longed for a bath. Licking my lips, I turned my head.

Zach was nowhere to be seen.

Panicked, I tried to rise on my elbows but couldn’t. For a few wild moments I feared he had deserted me. Yes, I should have known better. He had already demonstrated he was not the ogre he was reputed to be.

I licked my dry lips and croaked, “Zach? Zach? Where are you?” When there was no answer, my panic climbed. I struggled to sit up and was afflicted with dizziness. Then a shadow fell across me. I gave a violent start, convinced some beast had found me.

“What in the world is all the fuss about?”

I looked up. Zach had a small doe over his shoulder and was regarding me in puzzlement. “Where have you been?” I said.

“Off hunting.” Zach gave the body a thump. “You need meat, and a lot of it, to build your strength.”

I almost burst into tears.

“Are you all right?” Zach dropped the deer and knelt beside me. “I checked you earlier and would have sworn we beat the fever.”

“Why are you doing all this for me?” I foolishly asked.

Zach shrugged. “You need help.”

“But you hardly know me. And gossip has it that you hate whites, yet here you are, doctoring a white man.”

Chuckling, Zach replied, “My wife is white, and I sure don’t hate her. My father is white, and so is Shakespeare McNair, and they are two of the most decent men I know.” He sobered and said, “It is not whites I hate, it is white bigots. Or red bigots. Or any kind of bigot.”

“I will be forever in your debt. Anything you ever want of me, you have only to ask.”

“There is one thing.”

“Name it and I will do it,” I pledged.

“Whatever you do, don’t take it into your head to paint a griz. If a badger can do this to you, just think what a bear would do.”

I blinked and laughed and could not stop. Perhaps it was an emotional release. But I laughed as if his little joke was the funniest I ever heard. I laughed until my ribs ached, and just when my mirth subsided, he made another comment.

“Stick to chipmunks and squirrels and you should be safe.”

I convulsed anew.

“Or how about insects and birds? I think butterflies and wrens would be best. They are about as harmless as anything gets.”

“Please,” I begged between gasps. “I’m ready to split a gut.” But the laughter did me good in that it restored some of my vitality, to the point where I could sit up unaided. I suspect he made me laugh for that express purpose.

Strange to relate, but whatever barrier had existed between us was gone. I thought of him as a friend, and I flatter myself that he began to think the same of me. He was more talkative thereafter, and I detected none of the wariness that was so much a part of his nature. He had accepted me, and I accepted him.

I wanted to head out the next morning, but Zach wouldn’t hear of it. He claimed I needed a day to rest, and I did not object too strenuously.

That evening we were seated by the fire eating roasted venison when Zach remarked, “I’ve been thinking about that horse.”

There are moments when I wonder if I have a brain. This was one of them. “What horse?”

“The one with the blood. The one I have been leading around the past couple of days.”

“Oh.” The truth was, in my delirium I had forgotten about it. I glanced at where the animals were picketed.

“I’ve seen that sorrel before,” Zach said, and tore off a strip of venison with his teeth.

“You have? Where?”

“In a corral at Bent’s Fort.”

“You are certain? Who did it belong to?” As I recalled, the fort had two large inside corrals, one at the north end of the post and the other on the west side. Between them, they could hold over three hundred horses, mules and oxen.

“The Bent brothers,” Zach said. “They have stock for trade and sale, and sometimes they rent horses out for short spells.”

“So the Bents could have sold or traded it to practically anyone?”

“Well, we know it wasn’t an Indian,” Zach said with his mouth full, and lustily chewing.

“We do?”

“The saddle,” Zach said. “Indians don’t much like white saddles. They use their own or ride bareback.” He chewed some more. “No, I think it was a white man, but then that doesn’t explain the bedroll and the packs.”

“There weren’t any.”

“Exactly. And white men don’t go anywhere without their bedroll and supplies.”

I had not considered that. It added to the mystery.

Three days of travel went by. By then we were deep in the mountains. I came to appreciate why much of the Rockies were unexplored. Except for the intrepid trappers of a generation ago, few white men had ever penetrated this far in among the towering peaks.

Zach filled my head with facts about the land and the wildlife. I learned, for instance, that many of the streams only flowed during the winter and spring, that in the summer much that was green became parched and brown. And a lot of the water that did flow came from runoff from the snow high up. Rain was a relative rarity except in the summer when fierce thunderstorms broke out.

I was particularly interested in the habits of the animals, and in that Zach did not disappoint. He was a font of information. I surmised that he had been a keen student of nature while growing up. When I made a comment in that regard, he looked at me and said he had never thought of it that way. He had learned what he had to in order to survive. I added that in my opinion, he would make an excellent guide for others who might want to venture into the mountains.

Zach mentioned that whites were coming to the Rockies in greater numbers of late. It was the main reason his father had decided to move deeper in. He alluded to half a dozen homesteads scattered along the foothills.

I replied that it would not be long before whites did to the Rocky Mountains as they had done to the Appalachians in the East. “No barrier, not even the Rockies, can stop the tide of western expansion,” I said, parroting what I had read in many newspapers. “Our Manifest Destiny will not be denied.”

“Leave it to white men to think that multiplying like rabbits makes them special.”

He grinned as he said it, but I detected an undertone of bitterness. He did not want to see the mountains overrun, and I can’t say as I blame him. Man—and when I say that I mean humanity in general, men and women combined—insists on turning wilderness into farmland and filling it with towns and cities, wiping out the wild in favor of the tame and the safe.

That is what it was all about: living safe. People did not want to worry about being eaten by a grizzly whenever they stepped out their door.

This was impressed on me the very next day.

We stopped to rest the horses at noon. I spotted a woodpecker off in the woods, and taking my sketchbook, I hurried to catch it on paper before it flew off. It was the first of its kind I had seen, and I was so excited, I left my rifle behind. I lost sight of the woodpecker but continued toward where I had seen it last. I moved quietly, in order not to startle it into flight should I suddenly come upon it.

I was so intent on finding the woodpecker that I paid no attention to the woods around me, an oversight I regretted when the undergrowth abruptly crackled to the passage of an immense form, and into the open lumbered a flesh-and-blood behemoth.