Going Home A Barnaby Skye Novel

One Barnaby Skye did not have a care in the world, except perhaps for those big doings yonder in the shade of a brush arbor. He took his ease on a buffalo robe before his small lodge, watching puffball clouds spin out of the mountains and the gents in the brush arbor divide up the world. The wild times, when every trapper in the beaver country quenched a mighty, yearlong drought, had died, and now in the somnolent mid-July heat, rough trappers played cutthroat games, spun yarns, snored, or flirted with enterprising red hoydens. His Crow wife, Victoria, had abandoned him to his trapping cronies and gone to drink spirits and tell bawdy jokes with the Flatheads, allies of her people, who were present in force to trade at the Rocky Mountain Fur Company store and sponge up the bacchanal. She had female friends and even distant relatives among the Salish. The Flatheads and other tribes had swarmed to the great 1832 summer fair, this time in Pierre's Hole, the navel in Mother Earth just west of the Great Breasts, or Grand Tetons, which Barnaby Skye thought was plumb center, the best of all places for the great annual gathering of trappers. Pierre's Hole offered a mild climate, vast stretches of lush grazing ground for all the ponies, icy creeks tumbling from the mountains, abundant firewood, plentiful gamethough not any buffaloand saucy breezes eddying out of the Tetons to freshen the spirit as well as body. What better place to bake the year's aches out of the body, swill the Sublettes' firewater with new and old rivals, and engage in nefarious sins that ruined body and soul? This year, the frosty waters of the Tetons had been mixed with pure grain spirits carried in great casks from St. Louis, and seasoned with some ancient plugs of tobacco and cayenne pepper to produce trade whiskey, the alchemist's potion that set trappers and redskins to baying at the moon and marking trees. Skye had finally had his fill of that, and of the nausea that dogged each binge, and had sunk into a summer of indolence, his mind meandering and untethered and his keen eye observing the daily passage of dusky and predatory females. These were some doings, all right. For the first time, the American Fur Company had shown up, a big brigade of trappers led by William H. Vanderburgh and Andrew Drips, and they planned to set up a store of their own just as soon as Lucien Fontenelle arrived with that company's trade goods, which were being shipped up the Missouri and then carried by packhorse to the rendezvous. That was the big doings. They were late, which gave the Rocky Mountain Fur Company an edge for the moment. But from a longer perspective, the well-funded opposition probably signaled the end of the outfit. Nor was that all of it. This year an American army officer named Bonneville, fat with East Coast capital, had ventured west with his own expedition. And an odd Bostonian ice merchant named Nathaniel Wyeth had marched out with a whole troop of idiotmangeurs du lardin uniforms. And in addition to that, there was a big party of free trappers in camp, all of them ruthless rivals of the men Skye had allied with for years: Bridger, Fraeb, Gervais, Fitzpatrick, and Sublette. The new competition troubled Skye. The mountains were his mother and father. He wasn't a Yank, but a pressed seaman who had jumped his Royal Navy frigate at Fort Vancouver in 1826 and ended up in the Rocky Mountains, a man without a country. He had never eyed the settled United States, and had no great wish to. England was a closed chapter in his young life. He had Victoria, and if he belonged to anything other than the Trappers Nation now, it was the Crow Nation, into which he had married. He could scarcely imagine his slim Crow consort padding the lanes of London in her moccasins. But sometimes, in the still of the nightWheeler, Richard S. is the author of 'Going Home A Barnaby Skye Novel' with ISBN 9780812579086 and ISBN 0812579089.