You Smell Like Danger and Forever” Said the Blackfoot Woman After He Chose Her Over Freedom.

“You smell like danger and forever,” said the Blackfoot woman after he chose her over freedom.

The irons came off my wrists on a Thursday. I know it was Thursday because the deputy who unlocked me, a kid named Fendry, barely had hair on his lip. He said his wife had a baby the night before and he was supposed to be home by Thursday supper. He said that while he was turning the key, his hands were shaking, not for me but from happiness or the lack of sleep or both. I remember thinking, here is a man with a reason to go home. I walked out into the New Mexico sun and I did not have a single thing like that. The town was Cimarron. That mean anything to you? It does to me, still does. A place carries the memory of what you were inside it. And what I was in Cimarron was a man who’d made a series of decisions that landed him in leg irons for 14 months in a room that smelled like urine and rust eating cornbread that crumbled to chalk watching other men get let go until I was the last one left from the whole outfit. I won’t go through all of it. You don’t need every piece. The short of it is this. I rode with a group of boys, young most of them, younger than me and we did things that couldn’t exactly be walked back.

Some of it was cattle work, honest enough. Some of it was less honest. And some of it, the part that matters here, the part that put me in that cell, was something that happened in Lincoln County that a lot of people were calling a war. Though it didn’t feel like a war while we were in it. It felt like confusion and horses and noise and a particular morning on a rooftop that I can still see if I close my eyes. But that’s a different story. What matters is I got out on a Thursday in early spring, 1879, with $2.40, a horse they’d kept in lieu of something. I was never clear on what legally and a general understanding that if I was found in New Mexico territory inside of 90 days, I would go back in and this time they would find reasons to keep me longer. I was not mourning this. I was not celebrating either. I just I sat on my horse outside the Cimarron jail and I looked north and I looked south and I thought every direction is the same kind of empty when you have nobody to go to. I went north not because anything was north, not because I had a plan. Habit maybe. A man’s legs get used to pointing him somewhere while his head is still catching up. I rode for 3 days. I’ll spare you the scenery except to say it was April in the high country which means beautiful and cold in a way that gets into the joints. I had jerked beef and hardtack and a half bottle of something a man outside of Springer had sold me for 15 cents. I was trying to keep the money.

I was trying to be sensible about things. I had a way of being sensible that looked from the outside like not caring. I know that now. I didn’t know it then. By the third night I was up near Raton, camped in a fold of land where the cottonwoods still had snow tucked at their roots even though the sun had been working on them for weeks. There was a creek. There was a fire I built small because there was no reason to announce myself. I ate the last of the beef and I sat there and I thought I thought this. Nothing you have done can be undone. The question is what you do now. And I had no answer to it so I just stared at the fire. That’s when I heard it. Hoofbeats more than one horse moving east on the trail above the fold and they were moving wrong, too fast for the dark, too ragged to be a group that knew each other well. And then a sound that cut under the hoofbeats quieter than it should have been given what it was. A woman’s voice, sharp two syllables not screaming, commanding. And then a different kind of sound. The thing about gunshots in the dark in rough country, you hear them before you understand them and for 1 second you are a child again, confused before your body already has you moving. My body already had me moving. I was up the side of that fold before my brain had finished the sentence this is not your business. There were four of them on the trail, or there had been four. By the time I crested the fold, there were three men still mounted and one man down. And in the firelight from a torch one of them was carrying, a stupid thing, a torch, it ruins your night vision. I could see that the man on the ground was not moving. And I could see a woman. She was Blackfoot. I knew this not from any great knowledge of peoples, but from the beadwork on the horse blanket behind her, which I had seen before. And from the way she sat, which was I don’t know how to say this exactly, she sat like the ground was hers. Even pulled up short by three armed men on a dark trail in New Mexico territory, she sat like the ground was hers. She had a rifle across her knee. She had already used it once tonight, which accounted for the man on the ground.

And the three remaining men were the kind of men who were deciding whether to be afraid of that or angry about it. And they hadn’t decided yet. I’d seen that calculation before. I knew how it usually went. I didn’t think about it. That’s not quite right, I had thoughts, they just moved fast. I thought, “This will cost you something.” I thought, “You just got out.” I thought, “90 days.” And then I stepped out onto the trail with my own rifle up, and I said, “Ride on.” The one with the torch turned it toward me. “Who the hell are you?” “Somebody who just told you to ride on.” There’s a thing that can happen in moments like that. A man can calculate whether you’re serious. And if he’s done enough of that kind of thing, he can usually read it pretty well. The one with the torch read it. He looked at me for maybe 4 seconds, looked at how I was standing, where my eye was, whether my hands were making any small movements that meant I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t making those movements. He dropped the torch, heel-kicked his horse, and the three of them went down the trail at a run. One of them shouted something back at me that was either a threat or an obscenity, and in the dark at that distance it was hard to tell the difference. I stood there until the sound was gone. Then I looked at the man on the ground, gone, no question, and then I looked at her. She had not moved. She was watching me the way you watch something you’re not sure about yet, careful and even and ready to revise. I lowered my rifle. “You didn’t need me,” I said. “No,” she said. But the arithmetic was difficult. I almost laughed. I hadn’t laughed in a long time.

I didn’t quite, but it was close. I said, “Where are you headed?” “North into Colorado territory.” I said, “I’m also going north.” She didn’t say, “Then ride with me.” She didn’t say anything. She looked at me for another few seconds and then she turned her horse and started up the trail. I went back down to my camp, got my horse, kicked out the fire, and caught up with her. I didn’t know her name yet. I didn’t ask, she didn’t volunteer it. We just rode. Her name was Wren. Not a Blackfoot name, or not precisely. She had another name in her own language, one that I did not learn to say correctly for a long time, and Wren was the translation she’d given to the first white man who’d asked, which was a missionary, and it had stuck. She told me this on the second day, matter-of-factly, the way she told me most things. She was I need to be honest here because the easy thing would be to say she was beautiful and leave it at that, and that’s not it. She was, but it wasn’t that. It was more that she had a particular quality of attention. She listened to things, to the land, to weather, to horses, to people, the way you listen when you think what you’re hearing matters. And when she looked at you, you had the sense she was hearing something underneath the noise you were making. I was at that point in my life making considerable noise, just internal noise. The kind a man makes when he has spent 14 months alone with too much time to sit with what he is. I was 31 years old. I had a record, a partial reputation, and a strong suspicion that I had already missed the fork in the road that might have led somewhere worth going. We didn’t talk much those first 2 days. We rode. I shot a rabbit and she cooked it with something she had dried herbs from a pouch she kept in her saddlebag, and it tasted like something you’d get in a decent kitchen, which was not what I expected. The first night I slept on one side of the fire and she slept on the other. She had her rifle laid where she could reach it. So did I.

Neither of us discussed this. It was simply the appropriate arrangement. On the third day she said, “What were you in for?” I said, “How do you know I was in for anything?” “You came out of Cimarron walking like a man who just got his legs back.” She paused. “I came through Cimarron 4 days ago.” I thought about not telling her. Then I thought about the fact that she had already told me, in her own quiet way, that she knew and that she was still riding north beside me. “Lincoln County trouble,” I said, “14 months.” She nodded, just nodded like this was a piece of information she was filing somewhere. “You,” I said, “where are you coming from?” She was quiet for a while, long enough that I thought she wasn’t going to answer. Then she said, “I had a husband. He was a trader. He died in the fall of the cold sickness, what you call pneumonia. His family didn’t want me to have any part of the trade after, so I am going back to my people who are north and east of here.” She said it plain, no particular color in her voice. “His family said some things before I left.” “What kind of things?” “The kind men say when they want to make themselves feel better about what they’re taking.” “I didn’t say anything,” she went on.

“The men on the trail, two of them were his cousins.” So that was the arithmetic she had mentioned. I understood it better now. We rode on. After a while I said, “How far is north and east?” “Many days.” Do you know this country? Parts of it. I know more parts, I said, which was true. I’d ridden through most of the territory north of Raton in the years with the outfit. I knew where the water was mostly. I knew which passes went through and which ones didn’t. Then be useful, she said. It was not unkind. It was just direct. I appreciated it. I was tired of people being careful around me, tiptoeing around what I was. She just said, be useful, like it was a reasonable thing to ask and she expected a reasonable response. I was useful. We made good time. Four days north of Raton in a high valley I knew from a winter two years back, it started to snow. Not the light snow of elevation, the kind that falls pretty and doesn’t mean anything. This was a late spring storm coming down off the peaks, heavy and wet, the kind that kills livestock and drops a man’s temperature faster than he thinks it should. I knew this valley. I knew there was a blind shack at the far end of it belonging to a rancher named Aldous Peck, who as far as I knew had not tried to kill me in the past, which put him in a relatively good category. We pushed through to it. The snow was knee-deep on the horses by the time we reached the shack and we were both, I won’t say we were in trouble yet, but we were heading toward trouble. The shack was empty, the way these shacks usually are in April. Firewood stacked against the east wall, a rope bed with a canvas tick, a stove that needed some coaxing, a tin of something that turned out to be beans. I got the fire going. She saw to the horses, squeezed them into the tiny lean-to on the shack’s north side, packed them in with the hay that was there. She knew horses the way I knew them, which is to say she knew them better than she knew most people. They were calm under her hands.

We spent that first storm night doing what you do, warming up, eating the beans, sitting on opposite sides of a small stove and not talking much. The snow came down outside with the kind of sound that makes everything inside feel particular, separate from the world. I was aware of her across that room in a way I hadn’t let myself be on the trail. She caught me looking once, she didn’t look away. She held it for a moment considering me, then looked at the stove. I said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do when we get north.” She said, “What did you do before?” “I worked cattle some of the time. The other times were less defined.” “You could work cattle again.” “I could.” I turned my tin cup. “Men don’t much want to hire someone who spent 14 months in Cimarron.” “Some men do.” She said, “The question is whether those are the men you want to work for.” I thought about that. She wasn’t wrong. The men who’d want to hire me knowing my record were exactly the kind of men who’d got me that record in the first place. I said, “What about you?” “I will go back to my people.” She said, “I will” She paused like she was translating something in her head. “I will figure out what I am now. A widow here, a daughter there, something different from what I was before.” “Is that all right with you?” She looked at me. “Is what all right?” “Starting over, figuring out what you are.” She was quiet then. “I’ve done it before a beat, so have you.” I didn’t argue. She was right about that, too. The storm kept us there for 3 days. I will tell you what 3 days in a one-room line shack in the high country does to two people. It puts them in each other’s presence in a way that you can’t manage around. On the trail you have space and forward motion and the noise of horses and wind. In a 10 by 12 room with one stove and one window, you just have the other person. What I learned about her in those 3 days She slept with an arm over her face. She woke early, earlier than me, and she would be sitting by the stove when

I opened my eyes, just sitting, not doing anything in particular. She didn’t explain this. She boiled coffee without being asked. She didn’t drink much of it herself. She drank something from a packet of her own, something that smelled like pine and smoke. She had four languages. The one she’d grown up with, English, some French from the trading years, and something else she used once when she was half asleep that I didn’t recognize. She read. She had a slim book in her saddlebag, pages worn soft, something in her own language, and I asked her once what it was, and she said, “My grandmother’s words.” She spoke them to a man who wrote them down. She said this with a kind of careful pride that meant, “Don’t ask more, this is mine.” She didn’t pry into me. I noticed this. She would answer questions I asked, and occasionally she would ask me something, but she didn’t dig. She just accepted what I offered, which from the women I had known was not common. Most of them wanted to understand me, which is another way of saying they wanted to change me. She seemed genuinely unbothered by not understanding me. She would just take the piece I gave her and set it next to the rest. On the second afternoon, the snow was still coming down, and I was at the window watching it, and she said, out of nowhere, “Were you loyal to the men you rode with?” I thought about it. “Yes.” “Did they deserve it?” I turned from the window. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, the book closed in her lap, watching me. “Some of them,” I said. “But you stayed anyway.” “I did.” “Why?” I had thought about this in the 14 months, and the answer I’d come to was this. Because once I was in, I didn’t know how to be out, and because some of them were the only people in a long time who’d acted like I mattered. She took that in. She set it somewhere. Then she said, “You matters.” Just that, said at the same way she’d said everything else, not as a gift, not as comfort, but as a simple statement of fact, the way you’d say there is snow or the fire needs wood. She wasn’t performing it. She just said it because she had looked at the evidence and arrived at a conclusion. I didn’t know what to do with that. I looked back out the window. She went back to her book. On the third day the snow stopped and the sky went that particular high country blue that comes after a storm, clean and deep, like somebody had rung all the gray out of it. We packed the horses in the morning. I restocked the firewood out of habit. You leave these shacks the way you found them if you were raised at all, and she did the same without me asking. We rode out into the world, and it was white in every direction, and our horses punched through the crust of it with a sound like cloth tearing. She said, “There will be more like those men on the trail.” “Yes,” I said. “His family has” she thought about the word, “reach. They move cattle. They know people.”

“How many days to your people?” “Seven, maybe eight.” “Then seven or eight days,” I said. She looked at me. “You have your 90 days.” “I have 90 days in New Mexico. We crossed into Colorado day before yesterday.” She turned forward. We rode on. The first one came on the fifth day north of the shack at a river crossing I knew. It had a particular name on the maps, but most people just called it the crossing, which is what happens to a lot of places out there. They get named for the thing you do at them. He was alone, which was either bold or foolish, and in my experience those two things were often the same. A broad man on a broad horse waiting at the bank like he’d known where we’d be. He had the look of a man who done this kind of work before, patient rather than urgent. He called out to her by her married name, which was not her name, and she went very still. I moved my horse up a few steps. The man said to me, “This doesn’t concern you, friend.” “I’m not your friend,” I said, “and it does.” He looked me over. He said her married name again to her like I hadn’t spoken. “The family just wants the ledger, the account books from the trade. You took them.” “They were my husband’s,” she said. “He left them to me. You know this.” “The family doesn’t see it that way.” I said, “The family can take it before a judge.” He looked at me again, harder this time. “I don’t know you.” “That’s fine.” “I could find out who you are.” “You could.” I let him hold that. “Or you could ride south and tell whoever sent you that she’s under protection and the ledgers will be with a judge in Denver in 30 days. And if the family wants to make a legal claim, they can do that.” I paused. “Or you can make a problem here, which I will solve, and then the family still has the same situation only with one less man.

” He was quiet for a long time. The river moved around his horse’s legs. I watched his hands. Then he turned and rode south. Ren didn’t say anything for a while after. We crossed the river and climbed the far bank and she said, “Is that true about Denver?” “We can make it true.” She was quiet another moment. “Then I don’t know why you’re doing this.” “I thought about it,” I said, “because it’s right and because you rode north and let me ride with you and that means something.” She absorbed this. She did not thank me exactly, but she turned and looked at me and the look she gave me was there’s no short way to say what that look was. It was the look of a person who has been doubted a great many times and has made peace with that and is therefore caught entirely off guard by not being doubted. Like something she’d expected to have to defend and had been carrying the defense of and found she could set down for a moment. We rode on. The second one came 6 days north of the shack and this time there were three and this time there was less talking. I won’t go into the specifics. The specifics of these things age badly. What I will say is that I took the first shot to the left arm high, and it was a bad one, not a through and through, the ball stayed in, and that after that the specifics resolved themselves somewhat faster. I will also say, afterward I fell off my horse. I don’t mean I was thrown. I mean I got down to check on her. She had a cut across the palm of her right hand, not deep, from something, and I went to one knee, and then I went to both, and I said, “Give me a minute.” And she said, “You’re losing blood.” And I said, “I know, give me a minute.” And then I was looking at the sky. The next thing was pain, which I’d expected, and warmth, which I hadn’t. I was inside, some kind of structure, not a cabin, but a lodge, maybe. Skins and pole construction. There was a fire. There was a smell I didn’t recognize, sharp and herbal, not unpleasant. And there was pressure on my left arm that was the controlled, careful kind, not the accidental kind. I turned my head. She was beside me. Her right hand was wrapped. She was doing something to my arm with strips of cloth and something packed into the wound, a poultice, I would learn later, made from things she’d carried in that saddlebag, things I’d wondered about and never asked. She saw me look at her. She didn’t stop what she was doing. She said, “You’re going to be all right.” “Where are we?” “A camp, not mine, Yute. I know the family here.” She kept working. “I asked them to let us stay. They are not They are not warm about it. But the woman here owes me a debt. We can stay until you are fit to ride.” “How long was I out?” “Part of yesterday, all of last night.” She tied off something. “The ball is out. That was the hard part.” I looked at the ceiling of the lodge. The smoke from the fire found its way up through a hole, and the sky was visible through it, gray-blue afternoon.

“You pulled it.” “Yes.” I’d had bullets pulled before. It is not something you want done to you without knowing who’s doing it. You know how to do that. I have done it twice. Both times the person lived. She said this dryly, “You are the third.” I thought you said I’d be all right. I believe you will be. A pause. But I thought you should know my sample size. There it was again. That thing she did that was almost humor but wasn’t quite. That landed somewhere between joke and simple honesty. And you could laugh at it or you could take it seriously. And either way she just told you what she meant. I said, “Thank you.” She was quiet. She wrapped a final layer and checked the tension. Then she sat back and looked at me the way she had at the window of the line shack, the considering look. She said, “Why do you do that?” “Do what?” “Thank people immediately as if the thanks is something to get through.” I thought about that. Habit maybe. “It doesn’t sound like you mean it.” “I mean it.” I paused. “I just don’t know how else to say it.” “Then say it differently.” I looked at her. “I owe you something I can’t pay back.” I said. “That’s the truth of it. You’ve kept me alive. I don’t know how to carry that gracefully.” She was still looking at me. Then she said quietly, “You’ve been keeping me alive for 6 days.” “That’s different.” “How?” I didn’t have an answer for that. Or not one I wanted to say out loud which is a different thing. She looked away toward the fire. After a while she said, “Sleep. You’re going to need more of it.” I slept. I was in the Ute camp for 9 days. The wound was deep and it wanted to go bad and didn’t. Mostly because of what she packed into it. And because she changed the packing every morning and every evening with a precision that I had seen in field surgeons and had not expected to find in a one-room camp in the Colorado high country. The family there, a man named Catches Creek, his wife, his wife’s mother, two teenagers, they tolerated me with a range of responses, from the wife’s mother who seemed to find me mildly amusing, to Catches Creek who simply said nothing to me for seven of the nine days. On the eighth day he sat down near me while I was eating and said, in English that was better than my Spanish, “You came with Ren Speaks to Water.” which I gathered was closer to her real name. “I did.” I said. “She says you have protected her.” “She has protected herself. I helped with some of it.” He looked at me for a while, then he said, “She is a serious woman.” “I’ve noticed.” “Most men don’t know what to do with a serious woman.” He paused.

“They want them to be simpler.” “I said she’s not simple.” He didn’t say anything to this, but something in his face changed, not approval exactly, more like he had revised something about me and filed it away. On the ninth day I could stand up without my vision going dark. By the tenth I could get a saddle on a horse slowly. She watched me do it, not helping, just watching, making sure. I turned to her, “What happens now?” “Two more days.” she said, “To my people.” “Are they expecting you?” “They know I am coming.” “A rider went ahead.” She finished checking the cinch on her own horse. “They know I am bringing someone.” I absorbed this. “What did you tell them?” “The truth, that I met a man on a dark trail and he was She paused, choosing something, useful.” “Useful?” I said. “You take that word badly.” she said. “I don’t mean it badly.” “What do you mean by it?” She looked at me, then she said something in her own language, not for translation, not aimed at me exactly, more like she was saying it out loud to hear how it sounded. Then she gave me the English of it. “I mean that you have been here when it mattered. That is a rare thing.” She pulled the reins over. “Most people are not there when it matters. I thought about the boys I’d ridden with. The ones who’d been there and the ones who hadn’t. The ones who’d gotten out before the end and the ones who’d been there at the end and the one or two who’d stayed even when staying cost them everything. I thought about 14 months of nobody. I said, “I’ve had the same experience.” She mounted, “Then let’s ride.” Her people were camped two days northeast in a valley I had not been through before. One of those valleys that seems like it belongs to a different country from everything around it. Green and sheltered, a river cutting through it, the peaks visible but far back, not pressing. When we came down into it, there was a woman waiting at the edge of the camp. She was older, her mother, I understood later. She watched us come in and her eyes went to Wren and she held them there and something passed between them that I wasn’t supposed to see and couldn’t have translated anyway. Then her eyes came to me. She said something. Wren answered. The older woman looked at me again, then back to Wren. She said something else and her voice had a quality in it not unkind but probing, asking something. Wren said something back that was short, four or five words. Whatever they were, they seemed to settle the question. The older woman nodded and moved aside. I said, “What did she ask?” Wren rode on a few steps, then she said, “She asked who you were.” “What did you tell her?” A pause, she was looking straight ahead. “I told her you were a man who had chosen to stay when choosing was hard.” I stayed in that camp for 3 weeks. I told myself it was the arm, the arm needed more healing. That was true, it did, but it wasn’t the whole truth. The whole truth was that for the first time since maybe ever, maybe since something back in Tennessee when I was a child that I mostly couldn’t remember anymore, I was somewhere that felt like a place I could be, not just a place I was, a place I could be. I don’t want to dress it up. I did not know the language. I was not exactly welcomed. Some of the men there looked at me with a particular flat look that means you’re here until you prove you should be, which I understood and did not blame them for. I made myself useful in the ways I could. I worked with the horses. I fixed things that needed fixing.

I did not try to make myself understood through words I didn’t have. I tried to make myself understood through what I did with my hands. Ren translated when it mattered. She did not translate everything, and I came to understand that what she chose not to translate was its own kind of information. She was deciding what I needed to hear, which meant she was thinking about what I needed. Her mother’s name was Many Deer Standing. She and I developed a kind of language built entirely from objects. She would bring me something or gesture at something, and I would do the thing she seemed to mean, and she would either nod or redirect. She found me funny, I think. I was not offended by this. Being found funny is better than being found threatening. In the second week, Ren and I walked along the river one evening. The sun was going. The mountains on the western side of the valley had that amber on them that happens for about 20 minutes if you’re paying attention, and then it’s gone. She said, “What will you do?” “I don’t know yet,” I said. “The 90 days.” “70 now, about.” “And after?” I picked up a stone from the bank and turned it in my hand. River smooth, the color of slate. “I could go north to Montana, maybe. There’s work there for men who know cattle and horses.” She was quiet. I said, “Or I could stay.” The river moved. The amber on the mountains began to fade. She said, “You should know that I am not I am not easy to be with.” “I mean this plainly. She was looking at the water. I have my own way of doing things. I have obligations here. I am not what I am here is not the same as what I was on the trail. I know that. You think you know it. Maybe, I said, but I know you, some of you. What I’ve seen is I stopped. Then I said it. What I’ve seen is the best thing I’ve seen in a long time, and I’ve seen enough of it to want to see more. She turned and looked at me. The look was a long one with something in it that I couldn’t read entirely or couldn’t read yet. She had taken things in stride all the way from Simmeron, the men on the trail, the snow, the wound, all of it. She had taken me in stride, but this she was not entirely taking this in stride. I could see that.

Something in the set of her face had changed. She said, “You smell like danger and forever.” I blinked. I’m sorry. It’s she almost smiled. It’s from something my grandmother said about men worth keeping, that they smell like danger and forever both at once. She turned back to the water. I couldn’t tell you the whole of it in English. I stood there with that for a moment. Then I said, “Is that what you think, that I’m worth keeping?” She was quiet long enough that I thought she wasn’t going to answer. Then she said, “I think you’re worth finding out about.” The amber was gone from the mountains. The sky went the dark blue of deep evening, and the first stars showed above the eastern ridge. I said, “That’s enough for me.” I want to tell you about the moment because the Bible I was given says there should be a moment, a real one, the thing that lands, and it happened the next morning. I was at the edge of the camp in the early gray before anyone else was up, checking the leg of a horse that had been favoring it. I heard her behind me before I saw her. She set a cup of something down on the fence post near me, the pine and smoke thing, her morning drink, and she didn’t say anything, just left it there. And she went to the next horse and checked the water in its bucket. It was the smallest possible thing. And I stood there with that cup in my hand and the steam off it and the gray morning coming up over the ridge and I thought, “This is what you were looking for.” Not the excitement, not the running, not the loyalty you felt for those boys on the rooftops in Lincoln County. This This ordinary specific real