Mountain man : a novel of male and female in the early American West by Fisher Vardis 1895-1968

Author:Fisher, Vardis, 1895-1968
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York : Pocket Books
Published: 1976-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

18

Because it was impossible to enter the geyser basins on horseback up the Yellowstone or over the Yellowstone Mountains Sam had to go south and up the South Fork and past Hawks Rest and down the Yellowstone to the lake. Across timbered mountains, black and beautiful with health, he followed the east side of the lake, going north, and then the north side, until he came to steaming springs. It was a marvel to all who had seen this coastline, for out in the cold lake were hot springs, some of them a hundred yards out; and there the hot and cold waters mingled, and steam rose from the surface. At the lake's edge a man could find water of any temperature, between icy cold and almost boiling. Before going to the area on the west side of pouting and hissing paint and mud pots Sam stripped off and plunged in. He had known no experience more exhilarating than swimming back and forth through extremes of hot and cold. It was such a delightful and thrilling surrender of his senses to the caresses that, floating on his back and looking up at the blue, he said to the Creator, in Bill's language, "No man alive ever made a bath pool like thissen!" What was it the woman had read from the holy book? "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them." How glad he was to be here, solitary, alone, and safe in the wilderness!

This evening he was entertained by the mudpots, which he thought of as mud mouths: they took him back to the blond neighbor girl, named Nancy, who had puffed her cheeks at him and then slapped them with both palms, pretending that her face had exploded. Another of her impish tricks had been to puff her cheeks as far out as she could and then insert a small reed between her lips. It was, she gravely told him, a puncture; as she forced air out through the reed her cheeks slowly collapsed, her blue eyes all the while soberly watching him.

The hot mud mouths puffed their lips out and up; and sometimes the lips parted and a burst of hot steam-breath shot up; and sometimes the lips were expanded to astonishing fullness, without parting, like thin gray rubber or a toad's throat. Now and then they sucked back and forth, as Nancy had sucked her lips in and pushed them out.

Sitting on warm earth among the mudpots, he tried to write a letter to his parents. Unlike the great explorers Lewis and Clark, who had come through the rocky mountain land before Sam was born, or famous scouts like Bridger and Carson and Greenwood, Sam had had twelve years in good schools. With note pad on his knees and brows perplexed, he wrote the salutation; and then for ten minutes wondered what to say and what not to say. Should he tell them that he had taken up arms against an entire Indian nation and next spring would be on the warpath again? No, he would not worry them with that.

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