Shots Fired: Stories From Joe Pickett Country

The End of Jim and Ezra

It took great determination for Jim — almost more than he had left inside him — not to throw back the heavy buffalo robes and slice Ezra’s throat open. His sheathed bowie knife was in his bed within easy reach, where it had been each night for the past twenty-eight years. Jim clamped his eyes shut and stroked the leather-wrapped handle with his fingertips. The blade was as sharp and as long as his thigh and he had used it to cut apart hundreds of buffalo, elk, deer, and bears. It had skinned a thousand beaver and he had shaved with it back when he shaved, and it had pierced the insides of three Indian bucks; two Arikara and a Pawnee. But he’d never used it to kill a friend.

Jim felt ashamed and he opened his hand beneath the robes and released the knife handle.

It was freezing inside the cabin, as it had been every morning for six weeks. The cold had made the chinking between the logs contract, crack, and fall out in chunks. The series of gaps let wind blow through the walls and a half-dozen inch-high snowdrifts had formed across the top of his robes, striping them, making them look, as Ezra pointed out each and every morning, as if he were sleeping under a zebra hide. Ice crystals tipped the ends of individual hairs on the outside of the robe as well. Making it as gray as Jim’s beard.

He fought against the urge to grasp the knife again as Ezra’s socked feet thumped the rough wood-plank floor. Jim listened in tortured silence as Ezra rose unsteadily to full height and stretched. Ezra’s bones cracked like ice shifting on a lake, a combination of low-grounded pops and high snapping sounds. Ezra growled from deep in his chest and worked a gob of phlegm up into the back of his throat while he sniffed in the fluid of his nose so it could all mix together into a substantial globule he called his “morning mass” because he was Catholic. Ezra just held it there — sometimes it seemed for a half an hour to Jim — while the man poked and prodded the fire and added lengths of split wood until it took off and started to roar. Waiting for the flames, Ezra breathed raggedly through his nose because his mouth was full. When the fire was intense enough that the metal grate was hot, Ezra spit his morning mass onto the bars of the grate and said, “Lookit that thang burn.”

Sometimes, Jim could hear it pop.

Jim knew Ezra would then say, “Jim, come lookit this thang,” because Ezra said it each and every morning, and had for ninety-two straight days. He said it again.

Ninety-three.

Ezra turned stiffly toward Jim while he pulled a clawed hand down through his matted beard to groom it. He’d once stood six-foot-four before he got that hump in his back and his legs bowed out as wide as his shoulders. He’d worn the union suit so long his leg hairs were growing out through the fabric. White salty blooms framed the crotch. A tobacco stain looked like a permanent teardrop under his left breast. Both elbows of the suit had long since worn away and Ezra’s blue-white joints stuck out the holes.

He cackled and said to Jim, “Lookit you sleeping under that zebra hide! It looks like a damn zebra hide the way it’s all striped like that.”

The cabin, corral, fur shack, and loafing shed had been thrown together on the western side of the Wind River Mountains too high up and too far from anyone or anything else. They’d been caught in early September by snow, and Jim could tell by just looking at the sky that more was coming fast, that it was just the beginning of a mean and heartless winter.

They’d been trapped by their own success, a phrase Ezra had latched onto and repeated two or three times a day.

It had been Jim’s idea, born of frustration and lack of beaver in the lowland creeks and streams, to go higher and farther into the mountains than they’d ever gone before. Farther than any white trappers had gone before. There’d been a sense of urgency because they were being pushed by newcomers. More of them all the time, flowing west and north across the continent like a plague. The newcomers had no idea how rough and raggedy it had once been, and had little appreciation for men like Jim and Ezra, who had scouted the rivers and valleys and found the beaver and fought the Indians. Jim and Ezra were like the elk. Once plains animals, they’d been pressured to seek higher ground.

It wasn’t fair, but Jim had never thought fairness was his due. So many things were working against them. The scarcity of beaver. The discovery back east that silk worked better for top hats than beaver felt. The plummeting price of beaver plews (pelts). And their aged and aching bodies.

Three things bound them together, two being their history and their treasure.

The third thing was the fact they were snowbound nine thousand feet in the mountains.

And all Jim could think of these days was how much he wanted to kill Ezra.

The fur shack outside bulged with skinned beaver plews six feet high by eight feet deep. The plews had been stretched and bound together. Now they were frozen into bales so heavy it took two men to load them. They were worth a fortune.

The cabin was one room, roughly twenty by twenty feet. There were two frame beds crosshatched with rope to provide some give, a table that listed to the right, two chairs, a slab-rock fireplace that wasn’t tight, and no windows except for the four-inch square in the door covered with bear-greased cotton cloth. Every corner of the structure was filled with snarls of traps and chains. They had one pot, one frying pan, and a tin for coffee and hot water.

It had been over three months.

They’d nearly made up for all of the things working against them the previous fall. They trapped more beaver — hundreds of them — than they ever had before as they worked their way up the river to its source.

They called the place Green River Lake and it was magnificent: a huge body of water overlooked by a square-topped granite tower that seemed carved to resemble the massive turret of a German or French castle. Not that either of them had seen a castle, but Ezra had a book with a picture in it. The inlets to the lake teemed with beaver and the lake itself was brimming with plump cutthroat trout.

And once they found the beaver, Jim wouldn’t stop. He urged Ezra to stay, until the two of them could barely walk due to their arthritic knees made worse by standing thigh-high in freezing water day after day checking their traps. Jim didn’t say “That’s enough” until they had to break through skins of ice to get to the drowned beavers.

By then it was too late. Winter was setting in. The logistics of transporting their bales of skinned beaver plews to Fort Bridger — it would have taken two trips — were impossible. Plus, they couldn’t leave their treasure or cache it. Indians would find it and steal it and sell off their year’s work. The Indians wouldn’t even consider it stealing. They’d consider it “finding.” Jim understood that and didn’t hate the Indians for the way they thought. They were well aware of the waves of newcomers. And they needed money and guns, too.

So Jim and Ezra built a temporary shelter, until the weather broke. But it never did.

Breakfast was fatty beaver tail and the last half of a ptarmigan Jim had shot the day before. The ptarmigan was delicious. Jim watched Ezra eat. Ezra chewed loudly and smacked his lips and his pointy tongue shot out of his mouth to catch droplets of grease on the tips of his mustache. When the bird was stripped of flesh, Ezra snapped off every bone and sucked the marrow dry until the bones were no more than translucent tubes on his plate.

Ezra said, “I’d give my left nut for coffee.”

Jim said, “Might as well. You got no other use for it anymore.”

A gust of wind hit the north wall of the cabin and shot a spray of snow inside.

“Wished I’d done a better job of chinking,” Ezra said.

“Me too.”

“Got any ideas how we can fix it? Mine wasn’t so good.”

Jim said nothing. It had been Ezra’s suggestion to fill the gaps with bear fat, thinking that the fat would freeze and seal hard as plaster. It worked for a week, until the grizzlies found it and licked it clean. One night, Jim and Ezra sat on Ezra’s bed with their .50 Hawken rifles across their knees, hoping the bears didn’t push the cabin down around them. They watched as huge wet pink tongues flicked between the logs. They could hear the bears smacking their lips and clicking their three-inch teeth. Jim went nearly mad from fear and impatience and finally went outside and shot a sow to warn them off, but the bears came back that night and licked the rest of the fat clean and tried to smash down the door. Jim and Ezra ate the sow.

“It’s gotta stop one of these days,” Ezra said, and paused. “The storms.”

“It’s winter.”

“We’re trapped by our own success.”

Jim closed his eyes. He knew he’d hear that again.

Jim blew into the cabin from outside with gouts of swirling snow. Ezra looked up from where he sat at the table shaving curls of meat from a frozen deer haunch into the pot for stew. “You look like a damned snow bear,” he said. Ezra was always observing him, Jim thought. And he never kept his observations to himself.

Jim had to use his shoulder to close the door against the wind and he slid the timber across the braces to seal it shut. He shook snow from his buffalo coat and hung it on a peg. His leggings were wet and packed with snow, and his winter knee-high moccasins needed to be greased because his feet were wet. The snow was six feet deep outside, more than halfway up the cabin. Paths outside the front door — rimmed by vertical walls of snow — led to the corral, the fur house, and to where the outhouse had been before it got buried. Yellow and brown stains spotted the top of the snow but they lasted only until the next storm. Ezra had stopped going outside several weeks before and had been using a leaky chamber pot he’d fashioned himself from pine staves. It was nearly full. He set it just outside the door each night so it would freeze solid. Unfortunately, he brought it back inside during the day.

Jim said, “Emily’s dead.”

Ezra shook his head. “How?”

“Froze to death. Hard as a rock. Must have happened last night.”

“Wolves get to her?”

“Not that I could see.”

“Is she too froze to quarter?”

“Ezra,” Jim said, “I ain’t eating Emily. She was a good horse. I ain’t eating her.”

Ezra shrugged. “What’s dead is just meat, Jim. You know that. You ate horses before.”

“We had to,” Jim said. “We had nothing else.”

“Just thought you’d like something new for a change.”

“Not horse. Horse reminds me of Birdwing and all that happened.”

The first winter, after they’d gone all the way to the other ocean with Colonel Ashley’s merchant party and turned around and struck out on their own to become trappers, Jim had taken a wife. A pretty Crow named Birdwing. While Jim and Ezra were out scouting creeks, the Pawnee broke into Jim’s cabin on the Bighorn River and took her. Jim and Ezra pursued the Pawnee for a month and found them and killed them all, only to find out Birdwing had died of disease the week before. On their way back, with Jim mourning and not speaking for days, the Pawnee found them. The bucks killed their pack horses and chased them into the badlands, where they literally rode their good horses to death in order to escape. And ate them.

“Birdwing,” Ezra said, after about five minutes of shaving meat into their pot. “You still think about her.”

Jim grunted.

“I think about that little whore at Fort Laramie,” Ezra said, smiling manically. “The redhead. I think about her every night before I go to sleep.”

Jim took a deep breath and said, “I know. I’m only ten feet away from you.”

Ezra guffawed. He’d never been contrite about that. Even when he worked himself so furiously he sometimes fell out of his bed.

“All I know,” Ezra said, “is this is the last of our fresh meat. Unless you can kill us something real soon, Emily might start looking pretty good out there.”

“I ain’t eating Emily,” Jim growled. “She was a good horse.”

“And now,” Ezra said, “we’re plumb out of horses.”

“We can get some come spring,” Jim said. “We can trade some plews for ’em if we have to.”

“Never should have come up this far,” Ezra said, shaking his head.

Jim turned away, his rage building.

“Sorry,” Ezra said, “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“You could have left any damned time,” Jim said through clenched teeth. “I wouldn’t have stopped you.”

Three months and Ezra hadn’t said it, Jim thought. Three months Ezra had held it in.

“After all we been through together?” Ezra said.

That night they ate deer meat boiled in melted snow and didn’t say one word to each other. The wind sliced through the cabin and the tallow candle shimmered and blew out. They finished eating in the dark. Jim kept waiting for Ezra to light the candle again because he had the matches. Ezra just ate, and sucked on his mustache and beard for dessert.

Jim didn’t have to watch to know what he was doing. He knew the sound. He smoldered.

After Ezra was done with the whore from Fort Laramie, Jim said, “Don’t forget, our fortune is right outside. I’m sure you want your half when this is all said and done.”

Since they’d been holed up, there had been an unspoken rule that they didn’t talk after they went to bed. Too intimate. Jim had broken protocol, but he was still seething.

“I said I was sorry for sayin’ that, Jim. Just forget it.”

“You could have left anytime. We could have squared up and you could have left.”

Ezra said, “It’s a cold one tonight.”

“You can leave tomorrow if you want,” Jim said. “I’ll get those plews down myself and I’ll sell ’em and send you your share wherever the hell you wind up. Just leave word at the fort where you want the money sent.”

Ezra sighed. “You’re like a dog with a rag in its mouth, Jim. You won’t let go.”

Jim closed his hand around his knife, and went to sleep that way.

Lines of snow, like jail bars, formed across the top of his blankets.

The next morning, Jim kept his eyes closed and gripped the handle of his knife while Ezra coughed himself awake, hacked phlegm into a ball in his mouth, and got the fire going.

Ezra spit the gob onto the grate and said, “Lookit that thang burn. Jim, come lookit this thang.”

Jim threw his covers aside, sat up, said through gritted teeth, “I’m leaving. I’ll be back come spring.”

Ezra stroked his beard and squinted at Jim. “How you going to cover two hundred miles in the snow to get to Fort Bridger?”

Jim gathered and tied up his ropes as a backpack and filled a leather sack with half the pemmican. He grabbed his possibles sack from a peg and stuffed it with half their powder and lead.

“Take more if you want,” Ezra said.

“This is fine. I’ll manage.” Jim couldn’t even look at Ezra. He couldn’t look at his rheumy eyes or filthy union suit or scraggly beard because he knew if he did he’d kill the man right there. Gut him, and toss the carcass outside for the grizzlies.

“The only way down is through the Pawnee winter camp,” Ezra said. “They might not like that.”

“Ezra,” Jim said, hands shaking, “get out of my way.”

“You want breakfast first?”

“Ezra, get out of my way.”

“Just because I spit in the fire?”

“That and every other damned thing.”

Ezra stepped back as if slapped.

As Jim pulled on his buffalo coat and clamped his red fox hat over his head, he heard Ezra say to his back, “God be with you in your travels, Jim. I’m going to miss you, my friend. We had some mighty great years together.”

Jim plunged outside with his eyes stinging. He convinced himself it was due to the blowing needles of snow in his face.

Through the howling wind he thought he heard Ezra’s voice, and he turned.

The wind whipped Ezra’s words away, but Jim could read his lips. Ezra said, “We’re victims of our…”

Jim ignored the rest.

The Pawnee winter camp was massive, stretching the length and width of the river valley. There were lodges as far as Jim could see on both banks of the frozen river. Smoke hung low over the lodges, beaten down by the cold. Hundreds of ponies milled in corrals and Jim could hear packs of dogs yelp and bark. Because of the snow and cold he rarely saw a Pawnee venture outside their tipis and when they did it was a quick trip, either to get more wood, water from a chopped square in the ice, or to defecate in the skeletal buck brush.

From where he hunkered down in the deep powder snow on the top of a hillock, Jim tried to plot a way he could avoid the encampment and continue his trek. It had been four days and he’d eaten nothing but pemmican — meat, fat, and berries mushed together into frozen patties — and he was practically out of food. He’d found no game since he left the cabin, not even a snowshoe hare. He’d tried to eat the skin-like underbark of cottonwood and mountain ash trees like elk did, but the taste was acrid and it gave him no energy. A cold breeze from the valley floor brought whiffs of broiled meat, puppy probably, and his mouth salivated and his stomach growled.

He knew from his years in the mountains he was a few days away from death. He had no horse, no food, and he hadn’t been able to feel his toes for twenty-four hours.

And he cursed Ezra once again and thought of going back. But he knew if he did, Ezra would have to die, because he couldn’t spend another minute in the man’s presence. Ezra had always been just a hair over the line into civilization and it hadn’t taken him long to slip back and become an animal again. A filthy pig. Jim wondered why he hadn’t seen it before, how close Ezra was to comfortable savagery. He imagined Ezra back in the cabin, eating his own leg.

It would be nightfall soon. The winter camp would go to sleep. If he could find their cache of meat, and steal a horse…

It took a long time to get back to the cabin. Jim didn’t know for sure how many days and nights, but he guessed it was over a week. Most of the time, his head had been elsewhere, for hours at a time, and he sang and chanted and cursed the world and God and those Pawnees who had filled him full of arrows and murdered him for sure.

He lurched from tree to tree on columns of frozen rock that had once been his legs and he peered out at the pure white of the sky and the ground through his left eye because his right was blind. Somewhere along the way he’d lost his rifle and his possibles sack. He thought his knives were still in their sheaths under his buffalo coat, but he couldn’t be sure and he didn’t look.

Jim scooped up snow and ate it as if it were food and it kept his tongue from swelling and cracking. He’d fallen on a snowshoe hare that was still warm from being killed by a bobcat and he pulled what was left of it apart and ate it raw.

He thanked God it hadn’t snowed hard since he’d left, because he could follow his own trail back most of the way.

And he thanked Ezra when at last he smelled woodsmoke and meat cooking and there was the cabin, and the fur shack, and the corrals.

Jim wept as he approached the front door and pounded on it.

“Who is it?” Ezra asked from inside.

Jim couldn’t speak. He sunk to his knees and thumped the door with the crown of his head.

The door opened and Jim fell inside. For the first time since he’d left, he felt warmth on his face.

And Ezra said, “You don’t look so good, Jim.”

Through the violent, roaring, excruciating pain that came from his frostbitten skin thawing out, Jim had crazy dreams. He dreamed Ezra had shaved, bathed, and put on clean clothes. He dreamed Ezra had re-chinked the logs and fireplace until they were tight with mud and straw and had emptied his chamber pot, swept the floor, and put the cabin in order. He dreamed Ezra awakened without hacking or spitting or even talking.

He thought, I’m in heaven.

But he wasn’t.

Jim painfully rolled his head to the side. Ezra was sitting at the table, finishing his lunch of roast Emily. Ezra’s face was shaved smooth and freshly scrubbed. His movements were spry and purposeful. His eyes were clear and blue.

Ezra said, “I didn’t think you’d come back. I thought you’d make it to Fort Bridger because you’re just so goddamned stubborn.”

Jim couldn’t speak. The pain came in crippling waves.

“I got the arrows out, but your flesh is rotten, Jim,” Ezra said. “You know what that means.”

Jim knew. He closed his eyes. The pain reached a crescendo and suddenly stopped. Just stopped.

Ezra’s voice rose and was filled with emotion. “You ain’t exactly the easiest man to live with, neither,” he said.

And with that, Jim died, a victim of his success.