Into the Savage Country Read Online Free Page A

disapproval.
    Later, Ferris sat cross-legged in front of an old brave who had been blinded in one eye, repeating phrases in the native dialect.
    “Sho da chi,”
he said slowly, which means “hello” in Crow.
“Sho. Da. Chi.”
    Blanchard found this horribly affected, and mimicked in a mincing tone, “Show dahhh cheee … Showww daaahhh cheee!,” which sent the men snickering, as they thought Ferris imagined himself to be some Lord Byron of the wilderness.
    Ferris ignored our ridicule, and while conversing with the one-eyed savage, took out a pair of reading glasses with one lens missing. Ferris put the broken glasses on the one-eyed native with a sort of pomp, which I understood was done as a jest. The other natives, seeing their one-eyed comrade wearing one-eyed spectacles, thought this was about the most amusing thing they’dever seen. The natives leaped and hung on each other and laughed loudly, and Ferris stood there, grinning and rocking from foot to foot, childishly pleased with his prank.
    Later Ferris showed them how the lens could be held at an angle and used to start a fire. This impressed them immensely. Ferris gave the glasses to the one-eyed savage, who returned Ferris’s generosity by giving a triple-thickness buffalo-hide shield, intricately ornamented on the edges and wedged with bits of glass to reflect the sunlight. It was a wonderful, much envied piece of native artistry that we passed around to examine, and that brought us all down a notch.
    There were songs that night, and feasting, and a second-year named Bridger tried to break out a bottle of Taos Whiskey that had been stowed in a hollow gourd. Smith and Ashley swiped the bottle, as they did not want drunk savages in the encampment.
    I went to sleep with the murmur of conversations in a strange tongue filtering into my brain, and the next morning when I stumbled out of my lodging I saw the natives had already departed, the last ponies still visible on a far slope. As they reached the crest of the ridge they turned and saluted, the crack of rifles searing across the snowy flatlands in a way that left a feeling of emptiness afterward.
    When they’d passed out of sight, I realized that Ferris had also stood watching their departure and was still standing there when I turned back to my lodge. He did not acknowledge my presence, but I had the feeling he knew I was there, and that however long I stayed, Ferris would make sure he stayed longer.
    In the following days I noticed that Ferris questioned all the old-timers on the various tribes—their habits and customs and thelocation of their villages. The veteran trappers began mockingly calling Ferris “the White Indian.” At the same time they started calling me “the Professor” because I carried a quill and parchment notebook. I resented being grouped with Ferris, and to combat the impression of being a fainthearted schoolboy, and also the doubts within myself, I made sure I was always the first out on our expeditions around the fort, and the first up to trap the nearby drainages, and in early December I made secret plans to trap the hills to the north of the fort. Smith had prohibited the greenhorn trappers from entering these hills, claiming they were full of Blackfoot, which only made the prospect more inviting.
    During an unusual warm spell that felt more like fall than winter, Bridger and I slipped off and headed into the forbidden hills which were increasingly rocky and lofty to the north and west of the fort.
    Bridger was a sturdy fellow with short-cropped hair and a ruddy complexion, and though he was as ignorant of book learning as the day he was born, he possessed all the accomplishments needed west of the Mississippi. He had a fine shot and was an excellent tracker and hunter and was as comfortable sleeping on rock as he was in a feather bed. He admired me for my education, and I admired him for his knowledge in everything that mattered out west.
    After half a day of crossing