Heaven Is a Long Way Off: A Novel of the Mountain Men - Hardcover

Win Blevins is an authority on the Plains Indians and fur-trade era of the West. He is the author of Give Your Heart to the Hawks and Stone Song, his prize-winning novel of Crazy Horse. He has also authored such novels as Charbonneau; Rock Child, and RavenShadow, as well as the Rendezvous novels.

He lives in Utah with his wife Meredith, also a novelist.

Chapter One

They were late arriving, and the last of the sunlight spread red-gold across the summits of the western mountains. A fresh, damp smell lifted up off the river, a promise of a blessing as evening came to the desert. A breeze stirred among the willow branches along the banks. The finger-shaped leaves caught the light of the sun and tossed it, red-gold-green, into the soft evening air.
 
Along the top ridges the cinnamon mountains turned the color of candied apples, and grew amethyst shadows on their lower slopes. The Colorado flexed and muttered on its journey from the mountains to the sea.
 
Sam Morgan looked around. Again he found the desert strange and alluring. He said to himself, What the hell am I doing here?
 
“On the adventure,” said Hannibal. Sam’s friend had an irritating habit of reading his thoughts.
 
Village leaders were riding out to meet them. It would be impolite to go closer to the village before courtesies were exchanged. Impolite even though these were the Mojave villages, where the fur brigade had spent a couple of weeks last autumn and knew the Indians were friendly. So Sam, Hannibal, and Captain Jedediah Smith sat their mounts in this place. Sam cursed. He squirmed in the saddle, itchy from his own sweat after the long ride. His pet coyote, Coy, sat in the shade of a creosote bush and panted.
 
“There’s a sorry piece of the adventure.”
 
Sam turned his head. A few paces into the brush three Mojave boys had built a small fire and were torturing horny toads.
 
The biggest boy reached into a hide bag, plucked out a toad, flat and ugly and the size of a palm. The creature had daggerlike spikes all around its head, and it was fighting its captor.
 
The boy laughed and threw the toad onto the fire.
 
Coy barked.
 
The toad skittered out of the fire like a stone hopping across water.
 
The smallest boy snatched the toad up and held it close to his nose. The toad sprouted blood from its eyes—Sam had seen this trick before. The boy jumped and threw the toad into the air.
 
Another boy snatched the creature on the fly and tossed it onto the fire.
 
The small boy wiped blood off his nose and grinned.
 
The toad came lickety-split out of the flames and slithered under another boy’s knee. The boy grabbed the toad coming out the back side.
 
Coy squealed, like a plea for mercy.
 
A picture floated into Sam’s mind—damnedest thing, he couldn’t imagine why. He saw his infant daughter suckling at the breast of Sam’s . . .
 
Meadowlark. Dead.
 
He shook his head to make the picture go away. But it stayed right where it was.
 
The biggest boy took the toad from the younger one and dropped it into the flames.
 
This time it first blew itself up big, and then, amazingly, never moved again.
 
Coy growled.
 
Sam started to rein his horse toward the boys. Hannibal put his hand out—no. Sam stopped. “What made them like that?” whispered Sam.
 
“A bad one leading good ones,” said Hannibal.
 
Sam’s eyes asked for help. Sometimes Hannibal knew things. Some of the men called him Mage, short for magician.
 
“Let’s go,” said Jedediah.
 
Sam handed Paladin’s reins to the magician and fell in behind Captain Smith on foot. About fifty yards off several leaders of the tribe waited to meet the trappers, and beyond them on the willow flat Sam could see the brush huts and crop fields of the village.
 
Safety, he thought.
 
Sam took a last glance at the boys. They were still mesmerized by toads and fire. Life goes topsy-turvy into death.
 
He forced himself to turn and study the Mojave leaders. There was Red Shirt, front and foremost, smiling broadly, wearing the garment that gave him his name. As far as Sam knew, it was the only shirt among the Mojaves, and worn only on state occasions. The Mojave men wore only loincloths, and the women only short skirts of bark.
 
Sam was not glad to see Red Shirt, not after he stole Gideon’s wife a year ago. But it was Sam’s job as segundo to stay with Diah, see how he handled things, learn what to do. Diah wanted Sam to be a brigade leader soon. Also, Sam had a knack for communicating with Indians, in sign language or even gestures and grunts.
 
Alongside Red Shirt was Francisco, the Mojave who had been to the Spanish settlements near the ocean and knew some Spanish. Behind these two stood three other leaders.
 
“Buenas tardes,” said Francisco. “Bienvenido, Capitán! Bienvenido, White Hair!”
 
Sam’s hair had been straw-colored, almost white for all of his twenty-two and a half years. He said, “Gracias. ¿Como esta ustedes?”
 
Francisco extended his hand to Sam and then to the captain, showing that he remembered this white-man nicety. When they shook, Red Shirt grinned broadly. His entire face was elaborately tattooed with dots in vertical lines. When he grinned, the lines queered their way into strange curves. Sam didn’t know if the dots were supposed to make a picture or pattern, but he knew the effect when the mouth curled the lines—it gave Sam the willies.
 
Francisco had a simpler tattoo.
 
Neither Sam nor Francisco spoke fluent Spanish, so they now resorted to gestures and single words to settle the rest. Sam laboriously asked permission for the brigade to trade and to rest its horses. Francisco translated into Mojave. Red Shirt said the people of the village were glad to give their hospitality to its friends, the men who hunted the beaver.
 
Now Red Shirt spoke what was probably his only word of Spanish. “Bienvenido,” he said, grinning. The grin made his tattoos squirm like snakes.
 
Captain Smith waved to the rest of the brigade to come forward.
 
“¿Bienvenido? Welcome to what?” said Sam in English.
 
“Maior risus, acrior ensis,” said Hannibal. The Mage liked to say things in Latin.
 
“What does that mean?” asked Sam.
 
“The bigger the smile, the sharper the knife.”
 
The twenty-one trappers and two Indian women set up camp hastily on an open spot by the river they used for a campground last year. Just upstream of them was the circle of brush huts, several hundred of them, that made up the village. All around them were the vegetable fields of the Mojaves. The Indians planted close to the river, and rises in the Colorado irrigated the crops.
 
Last autumn, when they arrived in much poorer condition, the brigade stayed two weeks with the Mojaves to rest their horses and put some meat back on their ribs. On the men’s ribs too—they traded for corn, beans, melons, pumpkins, everything the Mojaves had to eat. Then the trappers had known them as the Amuchabas. Now they thought of them as the Mojaves, the name for them in the Spanish settlements, and the name of the desert that faced all who would travel on to California, as this brigade intended to do.
 
The captain walked off to trade for corn, beans, and some of the bread the Mojaves made from the honey locust bean.
 
The other trappers rigged the camp. They unpacked and unsaddled the horses, led them to the river for water, and then penned them in a rope corral. They set up, laid out bedrolls, and put their possibles in the tents.
 
“Want to put a guard on the horses?” Hannibal asked Sam.
 
“Only at night.” These...