The Snowblind Moon. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.The Snowblind Moon

CHAPTER ONE
 
 
In a sheltered upland valley, circled by ridges and accessible in winter only through a cut in the hills where the river flowed between a low cliff on one side and a wagon track cut into a steep hillside on the other, the smell of woodsmoke hung in the air. Up against the wooded foothills at the north end of the valley the wagon road ended among the buildings of a small settlement dominated by a two-story log building that for more than twenty years had been the largest private dwelling and public house between the Black Hills to the east and South Pass far to the west, at the foot of the. Wind River Mountains. Behind the building stood a large barn, a chicken coop and a pigpen, and a scattering of sheds and outbuildings. Closer to the creek, standing against the woods, was a tipi of northern plains design, painted in the style of the Sioux. From the peak of the tipi and from two rear chimneys of the main building, smoke drifted away to disperse in the winds that occasionally gusted a plume of snow from the long front porch of the big house.
In the snow-covered meadow below the settlement a tall black man and a teenaged boy tossed hay from a large sled drawn by two draft horses. Strung out. behind the sled were fifty or sixty mixed-breed cattle browsing on the hay, a few horses and mules among them. The two men pitched the hay in even fines on either side of the sled, careful to spread it out so the less aggressive feeders in the bunch would have room to get enough.
"That's about the last of it," said Julius Ingram. Butch nodded. Julius said the same thing every morning. Every morning they loaded the big sled with hay and hauled it to the bawling cattle in the meadow and every morning when the hay was almost gone Julius would say "That's about the last of it," and Hutch would nod, saying nothing.
At first he hadn't said much because he'd never worked for a nigger boss before. Not for a lady boss either, for that matter, although he was used to both of them now, to his own surprise.
"Whoa." Julius spoke no louder than if he were talking to Hutch, and the two Belgians stopped in the traces. The short hair that curled beneath the flat brim of the Negro's hat was gray. His mahogany skin lay smooth over every bone and muscle in his face; the effortless movements of his broad shoulders as he cleaned the last of the hay off the sled suggested reserves of strength untapped by the morning's work. He wore a new corduroy coat and wool pants that had once been light blue but were now so faded and stained and patched that they could not be said to have any distinct color.
At seventeen, Hutch had attained nearly his full height and still he was a good head shorter than Julius. Unlike the tall black man, who appeared lean despite his strength, Hutch's form was stocky and heavily muscled, his movements short and economical. He took off his wool knit cap and stuffed it in a pocket of his ok) blanket-fined canvas jacket, enjoying the feeling as his scalp cooled in the wind. The thaw that had lasted for nearly two weeks was over and done with but the day was tolerable even so, nothing like the bitter cold days of midwinter. The snow that had been falling, since before dawn was thinning now, and for the first time that morning he could see across the creek and the broad expanse of willow marsh to the far side of the valley. He breathed in deeply arid noticed, not for the first time, how the smell of smoke from the stoves in the main house stayed in the air on a day like this when the clouds were low.
"When the chimney smoke's on the rise, you'll see clear skies," his mother, had told him. "When the smoke hangs low, it's bound to snow." But the rhyme hadn't explained how low-hanging smoke in the hot Kansas summertime back home had foretold the coming of black thunderheads and sudden violent wind squalls and crackling lightning that you could see walking all around you on the endless plains. Hutch wondered if it was the same here in the mountains in the summer.
He had come upon the little mountain park with the first snow in autumn, getting plenty anxious about where he was going to spend his first winter away from home, looking for some cattle spread that didn't already have all the winter hands it needed. All the outfits along the Front Range in Colorado said they couldn't use another hand and if they could they'd hire on some man who had worked for them before; or^ man anyway, not some runaway kid from Kansas so green he wouldn't catch light in the midst of a prairie fire. So Hutch kept heading north and west, toward the new ranges opening up in the Wyoming Territory, hoping he wouldn't have to go all the way to Montana to find work. But in Wyoming the story was the same--Sorry, boy, you best try farther on, up Virginia City way, mebbe, but stay west of the Big Horns if'n you reckon to hang on to your hair. He never would have come on the Putnam place at all if he hadn't gone wrong at the fork, mistaking the Putnam Cutoff for the old Oregon road. Not long before he rode into the valley and saw the big house he had realized he was lost, and heading deeper into Sioux country. The farther west he had come on his travels the more talk he had heard about new trouble with the Sioux, and he had been considerably relieved to see a white man's outfit and a welcoming face at the door, even if that face had been the dark visage of Julius Ingram. Hutch hadn't felt too particular about a man's color just then, so long as it wasn't red and decorated with war paint.
Miss Putnam had taken him on, wanting to know only if he was willing to work hard. "Yes, ma'am," he had said. "Everyone calls me Lisa," she said, but it went against Hutch's upbringing to call a white woman twice his age by her first name, so he settled for Miss Lisa and after a while she had settled for that too.
She had asked him another question that first day. It had seemed a strange one to Hutch and for a moment he had wondered if it were a condition of his employment--she asked if he could play the guitar or banjo. When he said he played the banjo little she had fetched an old banjo from the attic. It was in good repair, only in need of tuning. He began to play a little tune his uncle had taught him and he didn't even notice when the tall darky named Julius reached up and took a fiddle off the wall. Before he knew it the fiddle had joined in as pretty as you please and for the first time Hutch suspected he had found not just a place to spend the winter, but a place where he might be happy into the bargain.. It seemed a considerable deal, and more than he had hoped for.
The music appeared to mean a lot to Miss, Lisa and the others. Hutch found that Julius knew a few hundred tunes of his own, white man's songs from the southern mountains as well as Negro dance tunes. Hutch and Julius traded songs, and with their music they had warmed the kitchen in the Big House on many an evening while winter got down to business outside. It was only later that Hutch was told the banjo he played had belonged to Lisa's father, who had died back in the fall.
That there was a painful gap in the ranks here had been as obvious to Hutch from the start as the empty chair at the head of the table and the fresh grave on the knoll behind the main house. It was too early for the people here to talk much of Jedediah Putnam, but Hutch gathered that a man was gone whose kind passed this way all too rarely. In bits and pieces Hutch had learned more about the former mountain man from the almost mythical company of Jim Bridger and Kit Carson,. Joe Meek and Jedediah Smith, until Jed Putnam had assumed in Hutch's imagination the stature of a giant, almost a living presence, or perhaps more a sort of benevolent ghost, still protecting and presiding over Putnam's Park.
"Zeke!" Julius's voice was sharp. The lead horse had been slacking in his harness, letting his...