T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

Nobody knows how many traps Colter had but Adam liked to think of him as having ten, ten at least — more than Potts, anyway, because Potts was his inferior in everything, whether it was paddling upriver against the current all day or jerking meat or catching beaver to make the money to get him back out into the wilderness to catch more. What time of year was it? Fall. Fall, when the beaver pelts begin to thicken out again with winter coming on. Colter’s leg had healed by this point, though the scar was still puckered and red and he must have been thinking he’d just as soon have grown a new leg as be confined back at Fort Lisa with all those people around him and nothing to look at but bark-peeled logs and a big dull muddy river that had been all beavered out. He didn’t like people. Or not much, anyway. Not as much as being out there under the spreading sky and depending on no one but himself and why he’d taken Potts along no one could figure. Maybe Potts bribed him. Maybe that was it.

But there was a morning, first light, when they were checking the traps they’d set out the previous morning on a fair-sized creek that fed into the Jefferson — dusk and dawn, that was all they could risk, lie low through the day and don’t even think about starting a cookfire, making do with jerky and hardtack and whatever came to hand that didn’t need a flame under it — when Colter’s sixth sense kicked in. They were in their canoes, sticking close to the alder and willow that overhung the banks, silently going about their work. Fog steamed like breath out of the water and hung there, though it would soon burn off and leave them exposed. Colter was for packing it in, but Potts, greedy Potts, wanted to keep on till all the traps had been checked and re-baited. This was the part that always got to him, how Colter, who knew better, had hooked up with this clown and then gone against his own better judgment. But there it was. And still— still —even after they heard the clatter of hooves on the shore above them, Potts insisted that it was just a herd of buffalo coming down for a morning drink. Insisted, and spoke out loud too, though, of course, it was in a whisper. He must have said something like Don’t be a pussy or whatever the equivalent was back in the day.

That was when the Blackfeet appeared, a horde of them, painted, mounted on their ponies. There must have been two or three hundred of them or more. It wasn’t a war party, Colter could see that at a glance — there were women and children with them, crowding in now to peer over the bank at the two interlopers in the canoes. Maybe they’d only be robbed, that was what he was thinking — hopeful, always hopeful — and he made a peace sign and called out a greeting in their own language. He had maybe a dozen phrases in the Blackfoot language and could understand more than he could speak. Crow was the language he knew best. He could speak that fluently, but then the Crows, along with the Flatheads, were the enemies of the Blackfeet, which brought up a further complication — what if one of them recognized him as the sole white man who’d fought on the side of the Crows six months earlier? As for Potts, Potts didn’t speak anything. He just sat there in the canoe, looking as if he was going to shit himself.

One of the braves waved them into shore and they had no choice but to comply. Both canoes hit the sandbank at the same time and Colter sprang out to stand up straight and face them down to show he had no fear, but Potts wouldn’t get out. They’re going to kill us, he said in a choked voice, but they’re going to torture us first, and he tried to back the canoe away but one of the braves took hold of the paddle and then, when Potts went for his rifle, the brave grabbed that. At this point, Colter, who was stronger than any two of them combined, waded in, snatched the rifle away and handed it back to Potts. (Why, Adam always wondered, when they should have just waited them out? What was he thinking? Or maybe he wasn’t thinking, maybe he was just reacting.) That, unfortunately, started a chain of events no one could stop. Potts pushed back in his canoe and it shot out to midstream, at which point one of the Indians let fly with an arrow— shush —and there it was, embedded in Potts’ left hip, blooming there, the feathers trembling like rose petals in a breeze. And what did Potts do next? Snatched up his rifle and shot the closest Indian to him, which was the one who’d tried to take it away from him, now hip-deep in the water and looking hate at him. An instant and it was done. And in the next instant every brave there was using Potts for target practice.

So Potts was dead, dead in a matter of seconds, and Colter was standing there on the shore amidst all the hostiles howling like scorched demons and the women sending up their weird ululations of grief over the dead brave and half a dozen Indians in the creek now and wading to the canoe to drag it back to shore. Where they went at Potts’ corpse like a butchers’ convention, the women especially, hacking at him till he was unrecognizable, just meat, slick and wet and red. And Colter? Still there, still standing, still staring out unflinchingly, in another place altogether, ignoring them.

What was that like, seeing your companion gutted and dismembered out of the corner of your eye and not thirty feet away? How could anybody have just stood there instead of panicking and trying to make a run for it? Colter did. Five minutes, that was all it took for them to finish hacking at Potts till there was no more left of him than a skinned rabbit, and then they turned to Colter. Everybody was jabbering at once, crowding in to threaten him with hatchets, spears, the points of arrows and knives, their faces contorted and their mouths flung open so that every word, every shriek was delivered in a thunderstorm of spit. And they stank. They really stank. Stank worse than corpses come back to life. As if it mattered. As if anything mattered to Colter other than somehow saving his own skin. In the next moment he was stripped naked, his clothes sliced off him by the squaws’ knives, and here was what was left of Potts’ organs flung at him to spatter his chest with blood. One woman — the widow who’d been a married woman ten minutes before — was brandishing something in his face, flailing him with it, and what was it? White, flaccid, a twist of pubic hair and the sorrowful deracinated sack of what had been Potts’ testicles and the other thing attached to it, limp and bright with blood, and it could have been a turkey neck, stripped of skin and feathers, but it wasn’t.

So what was he shooting at? Was she serious? Movement, that was what. Who knew who was out there, whether it was the officers of the law or the Chinese smuggled up from Mexico on the panga boats they abandoned on the beaches till there were more pangas than seals and bundles of kelp combined or just some dog-walking shithead who was already dialing 911? And if he strapped on the night-vision goggles and whoever it was was gone in the space of those twenty seconds, what did that prove? That they were elusive. That they were smart. That they were watching him harder than he was watching them and that they were watching her too. He’d seen movement and so he fired, just to keep them off, just to let them know what his Chinese Norinco SKS Sporter semi-automatic assault rifle could do in the hands of somebody who really knew how to use it no matter what his father said or tried to say when his Aunt Marion gave it to him for his twenty-third birthday because her husband was dead and you didn’t have any use for a rifle when you were dead unless maybe you were a zombie and his Uncle Dave might have been a zombie in real life but definitely wasn’t going to be coming out of his grave anytime soon.