The Yellowstone by Win Blevins Read Free Book Online Page A

rose shrilly on the cool dawn air, complete with warbles, trills, and ululations, punctuated by yips and screeches, a coyote aria.
    Skinhead and Mac were laughing wildly but silently. If the Bloods heard it, what would they think? Some coyote must be spectacularly happy. Or hungry. Or desperate for a female.
    Mac decided to join in. He lifted his own voice in coyote cry, a lugubrious and mournful voice. Eyes closed, thinking of elaborations to add, Mac felt a big, rough hand clap over his mouth.
    Skinhead was laughing uncontrollably, but he wasn’t damn well going to let Mac howl. “Sounds like a bowel-blocked buffalo moaning,” grated Skinhead.
    Skinhead let go of Mac, and Mac held up a finger for attention. “Announcement,” he said confidently. “Goodbye Blackfoot country. This here is home.”

Chapter 6
    July, 1843, Moon when the buffalo bulls are rutting
    Mac Maclean had an idea. That was about all he had, being shorn of gun, horse, and meat, yet it was enough to make him happy.
    The sun was up. Mac, Skinhead, and Jim had scattered to look for food. Mac had found nothing. It would probably be a hungry day. Ten days ago, before the calf, he would have been panicky. But now they had bow and arrows and would find buffalo, or elk, or deer. He wasn’t starving. He was simply hungry, and content with that.
    Because he had an idea. An idea how to stay in the Yellowstone country.
    He was sitting on a sentinel rock projected out from the ocher sandstone that rimrocked the Yellowstone, dangling his legs, looking down on a bench above the river about three miles below the mouth of the Big Horn River. Below him was a fine, grassy bottom shaded by big, old cottonwood trees.
    In the bottom sat the fountain of Mac’s happiness, the remains of old, abandoned Fort Cass. Tulloch’s Fort, some called it. The American Fur Company had Sam Tulloch build it here back in ’32. Went off and left it in ’35—the Company started pulling back from the mountains then.
    Sublime accident, Mac thought, that he had stumbled on it. The Yellowstone River was the southern edge of Blackfoot country. The Big Horn was Crow country. A little east, the Yellowstone along the Rosebud and the Tongue and the Powder was Cheyenne and Sioux country. This spot, the mouth of the big Horn, was a crossroads.
    Three hundred miles to the east, Fort Union had the Indian trade. Fort Union, far out on the plains, huge, impregnable, once the castle of Kenneth Mackenzie of the American Fur Company, the king of the Missouri. Fort Union of booshway James Kipp, the vain. Of illegal whiskey stills. Of monopoly prices. Hated Fort Union.
    But it wasn’t as invulnerable as it used to be. American Fur had pulled out and left it to Pierre Chouteau of St. Louis, who did not have untold wealth and could not afford to ruin competitors by buying high and selling low.
    American Fur (everyone still used that name, though it was now Chouteau’s outfit) had just lost Fort Mackenzie, its mountain post. It had no trading post close to the Crows. No post for the Sioux and Cheyenne short of Fort Laramie, to hell and gone south on the Platte. No post in the middle of the West’s best buffalo country.
    Skinhead had decided to go back to St. Louis. Gonna trade his mountain yarns for the sweet flow of whiskey in the taverns, he said. Jim didn’t know what he was going to do, as usual, and didn’t seem to care. Now Mac had seen his personal light on the road to Damascus. He chuckled at his vision: He would be a trader. A merchant. Restorer and owner of Fort Cass, crossroads of the northern plains. And proud resident of the Rocky Mountains.
    Perched on the sentinel rock, looking over his new domain, he was giddy with delight. Or is it hunger you’re giddy with, Mac Maclean? he teased himself.
    Mac was amused at the irony. Scots had always been traders—Hudson’s Bay Company had been spearheaded by Scots in Canada. Northwest Company, too. King Mackenzie was a Scot. Yes, Scots were