The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [17]
When he spun and looked, at first glance he still couldn't pick out the man in the shadowed patch of juniper and downed trees. "Saw the car," the old voice came again, a chuckle entering it. "That Packard. Stories it could tell." A swag of juniper branch lifted, not quite where Ben expected, and the walnut crinkles of the aged face came into view.
"Christ, Toussaint, they could use you in camouflage school. Room in there for one more?"
"Make yourself skinny."
Ben eased in from the back of the hunting blind and found himself in something like a man-sized thatched nest. Toussaint had bundles of long-stemmed sweetgrass stacked all around the interior of his lair; the place smelled like a sugarcane field, and no passing elk would get any scent of man. Ben tried to get used to the confined space in a hurry, shaking hands with Toussaint as he inched past him. Sitting there potbellied on a rickety kitchen chair, in faded wool pants and a mackinaw that had seen nearly as many years as he had, the old hunter peering up at him put Ben in mind of a Buddha that a pile of grubby clothes had been tossed on. The rifle propped against the side of the blind showed a catalogue shine of newness, however. Toussaint chuckled again. "Sold a cow to get the gun to hunt elk. Don't know if that's progress."
He gestured hospitably. "Pull up a rock, Ben." Ben settled for a log end. Dark eyes within weathered folds of skin were contemplating him as if measuring the passage of years. "Haven't seen you since Browning," Toussaint arrived at. "You were catcher."
Ben smiled. "It's called 'end' in football, Toussaint."
"Did a lot of catching, I saw."
A dozen catches, in that final high school game against the reservation town; good for three touchdowns. Gros Ventre always pounded Browning into the ground in football, just as Browning always ran up the score sky-high against Gros Ventre in basketball. That game, though, Ben and his teammates had a terrible time handling a swift Browning halfback named Vic Rennie. "Vic damn near ran the pants off us."
"He knew how to run."
Ben's heart skipped when he heard the past tense. Had word reached Toussaint already? It couldn't have. He bought a bit more time with an inquisitive jerk of his head toward the far-off Rockies. "The last I knew, the Two Medicine country had elk. Why hightail it all the way over here to hunt?"
"Those buffalo."
Toussaint spoke it in such a way that Ben nearly looked around for shaggy animals with horned heads down in the high grass.
The old hunter swept a hand over the farmed fields below the Sweetgrass Hills, the gesture wiping away the past seventy years. "It was all buffalo color then, Ben. Too thick to count, that herd. I was just yay-high"—a veined hand indicated a boy's height—"and mooching my way to that Two Medicine country. The Crows gave me a horse, let me ride here with them—don't know why. All the tribes came here for those buffalo. Too busy hunting to fight. Even those Blackfeet." The dark eyes, a spark of mischief in them, held on the visitor again. "Could be some leftover luck here, so I come hunting."
"I'm glad I asked," said Ben.
"You are not here about buffalo. Elk either."
"True." Softly but swiftly to get it over with, he told what had happened to Vic.
When that was done, Toussaint looked out past the old contested country of the tribes, off somewhere into the swollen world of war. His voice turned bleak and Ben wondered whether a chuckle would ever enter it again.
"They blew up my boy?"
"He was pretty badly torn up by the land mine. They had to amputate."
A grunt came from the grandfather, as dismal a sound as Ben had ever heard. Quickly he reached to his jacket pocket. "I don't know if it helps, but I brought you a letter from Vic."
The old man held the pale blue sheet of paper at arm's length to read it. Watching this, Ben felt uncomfortably responsible for its contents, whatever those were. He'd had to move military heaven and earth—Tepee Weepy, which amounted to the same thing—to get word to Vic and then speed the resulting letter