Lord Grizzly, Second Edition Read Online Free PDF Page A

of yelp a man might make surprised in the act of love. It was so short a yelp, in fact, it sounded cut off.
    Hugh nodded. It could easily have been one of the lads caught in the arms of one of the Ree maidens. One of the braves might have at last had enough of renting out his woman for what little fofurraw he got for it: mirrors, ribbons, vermilion, and such.
    â€œYesterday wasn’t enough for the lads,” Hugh grumbled on. “Oh, no. They had to go back and push their luck some more.”
    Hugh remembered the trouble General Ashley had keeping even a small watch on board. All the way up the Missouri the lads had heard how easy the pennyskinned Ree squaws were, so that when they at last got to the villages they were primed for a wild spree. From early in the forenoon on, the cherry-eyed chattering Ree women had entertained the boys in the tall bluejoint grass to either side of the villages and in the jungle growth of riverbank willows along the rolling Missouri.
    Some of the boys hadn’t even bothered to seek cover with their pennyskinned quick loves, had womaned where they found it, in the roundhouses with the husband brave standing guard in the doorway for them or in the shadow of the picket fence with Ree policemen trying to keep giggling chokecherry-eyed little girls and little boys from watching from behind the midden piles. Even more scandalous had been the behavior of the Ree women when they spotted Willis the Nigger. They’d fought for a touch and a chance at that black oak, like he might have been big medicine itself.
    Hugh had sensed animosity in the villages while the desperate coupling went on. With a surly Ree brave named Stabbed, he’d been assigned policeman for the day and so couldn’t participate himself. And as watchdog policeman with Stabbed, and looking with a different pair of eyes, Hugh had caught an undercurrent in the villages that meant danger to the mountain men.
    On the surface the Rees seemed willing enough to trade some twenty Indian-trained mustangs for powder and guns and vermilion, and they might palaver civilly enough about a treaty General Ashley wished to bring about between the Sioux and the Rees and between the Mandans up the river and the Rees, but underneath they were thinking secret council. For Hugh, the ripe-cherry eyes of both Stabbed and other Ree chiefs glittered a little too fiercely out of their oldpenny faces. The Rees weren’t holding out the open hand so fully and so far as they might. Any time an Indian refused liquor, even watered-down whisky, as both Stabbed and the Ree chiefs had done, it was sign, and time to keep one’s eyes peeled.
    Thinking about all this, Hugh cautiously reached down to rub his right thigh and knee. Then he exercised his right calf a little, the buckskin legging making a soft tussing sound on the grit sand. “Doggone that leg. Gettin’ stiffer by the day.” Hugh kneaded it with powerful stub fingers, all the while warily watching the picket fence ahead for the least movement of stealth. “Well, it was kill or cure then,” Hugh muttered under his breath, thinking of the time he had jumped off Pirate Lafitte’s good ship
The Pride
and escaped to the coasts of Texas and in so doing had severely wrenched and strained his right leg. “Kill or cure then, and dog me if it don’t look like we’re in for the same peedoodles again.”
    By mountain-man standards Hugh Glass was an old man—in his late fifties. Most of the recruits in General Ashley’s fur company were men in the bloom of life, ranging in age from the boy Jim Bridger’s seventeen to General Ashley’s own forty-five, with most of the men running middle twenties, fellows like Jim Clyman, Tom Fitzpatrick, Johnnie Gardner, John S. Fitzgerald, and Willis the Nigger.
    Yet Hugh was a well-preserved man. He couldn’t run as far or as fast as, say, Johnnie Gardner or the boy Jim Bridger maybe, but he was stronger,