Tristan was tented with the worst of the ruffians in his company. Alfred was embarrassed when Tristan visited him in the field hospital, swaggering and sloppily dressed with manure on his boots. Tristan had smuggled in a bottle of wine which Alfred had refused. One of Alfred's fellow officers came for a visit and Tristan had failed to salute, sitting there drinking the bottle of wine and leaving without saying good-bye except to have Alfred tell One Stab to take his favorite horse if he didn't return. Outside the hospital tent Tristan's companion, a huge French-Canadian named Noel, a trapper from British Columbia, waited with downcast eyes in the rain. The news that Samuel and the Major were dead had just reached camp. They had been on a reconnaissance up toward Calais with a group of scouts when they had been hit with mustard gas, then cut to ribbons by machine gun fire as they wandered numbed in a glade of a chestnut forest. A lone surviving scout had come back with the story and was now being debriefed. Tristan stood there dazed in the rain and mud with his friend embracing him in sorrow. The scout who was from their tent approached with an officer in tail. They raced to the paddock and quickly saddled three horses. The officer commanded them to stop and they knocked him aside in full gallop northward toward Calais reaching the forest by midnight. They sat still and fireless through the night and then at dawn in the fine sifting snow they crept forward in the snow and wiped it from the faces of the dozen or so dead until Tristan found Samuel, kissed him and bathed his icy face with his own tears: Samuel's face gray and unmarked but his belly rended from its cage of ribs. Tristan detached the heart with a skinning knife and they rode back to camp where Noel melted down candles and they encased Samuel's heart in paraffin in a small ammunition canister for burial back in Montana. An officer interrupted, but left wordlessly when it occurred to him he would be strangled if he interfered. When they finished, Tristan and Noel drank a liter of brandy from their booty from a farmhouse and Tristan then left the tent and howled Goddamn God until Noel subdued him and he slept.
In the morning Tristan awoke and heartlessly refused to commiserate with Alfred when a messenger came to bring him to the hospital tent. He wrote a note and taped it to the canister saying, "Dear Father, this is all I can send home of our beloved Samuel. My heart is broken in two as yours will be. Alfred will bring it back. You know that place he should be buried up near the spring in the canyon where we found the horns of the full curl ram. Your son Tristan."
Then Tristan went mad and there are still a very few old veterans up in Canada that remember his vengeance, because he was captured and restrained before it reached full flower. Tristan and Noel first feigned new seriousness as soldiers and volunteered for the scouts on nightly reconnaissance missions. At the end of three nights seven blond scalps hung in various stages of drying from their tent pole. On the fourth night Noel was fatally wounded and Tristan reached camp at mid-morning with Noel over the pommel of his saddle. He rode past crowds of soldiers to his tent where he laid Noel on his cot and poured brandy down his lifeless throat. He sang a Cheyenne medicine song One Stab had taught him and a group of soldiers gathered around the tent. Alfred was brought on a stretcher by the commanding officer to reason with Tristan. When they opened the tent flap Tristan had made a necklace of the scalps and had laid his skinning knife and rifle across Noel's chest. They put him in a straitjacket and sent him off to a hospital in Paris where he escaped within a week.
The doctor who attempted to treat Tristan in Paris was a young Canadian from Hamilton who was given the psychiatric ward somewhat by default. In his postgraduate studies at the Sorbonne he had dabbled a bit in this new science of behavior but was ill-prepared for the shell-shocked and hapless victims of fear that arrived daily. His youth and adopted Parisian cynicism at first led him to believe that the men were merely cowards, but their odd behavior soon disabused him of that notion. They were traumatized puppies who either cried out for their mothers at night or retreated into a permanent and inconsolable silence. The doctor so doubted his ability to knit up their souls that he became almost bored with his patients and did all he could to have them shipped home. Thus he was fascinated with the arrival of Tristan when the ambulance driver advised him that a true "crazy" was waiting to be unloaded. The doctor sent attendants and read the report from Tristan's commander. He felt himself oddly unmoved by the scalpings and was surprised at the commander's horror. How could mustard gas be considered normal warfare and not scalping, in reaction to the death of a brother? All the doctors had been prepped on the medical complications of mustard gas which in fact constituted the beginning of truly modern warfare. The doctor had studied the classics at Oxford and felt himself learned on the subject of vengeance. He had Tristan brought to his office, excused the attendants and released the man from his straitjacket for which he got a polite "Thank you" and "May I have a drink?" The doctor loaned Tristan a uniform and they walked through the Bois de Boulogne to a small café where they ate and drank in silence. Finally the doctor said that he was aware of what had happened and there was no need to talk about it. Unfortunately it would take a number of months to process Tristan out of the army and send him home but he would do the best he could to make Tristan's stay as pleasant as possible.
It took several weeks for the news to reach Montana. One afternoon late in February on a day that was cold but sunny and clear after a storm had abated, Pet was driven by one of the new hands to Choteau for groceries and to pick up the mail. Ludlow wiped the frost from a kitchen window and stared at the mere ounce of sun he figured to be hovering above the bluish snowbound shadows of the barn. Decker and One Stab sat at the table drinking coffee and arguing about altitude with maps spread before them. One Stab was correcting the maps because he had covered the area from Browning to Missoula with a Cree friend known reverently as One Who Sees As A Bird, a man with an uncanny topographical perception of territory. One Stab disliked the altitude numbers attached to mountains. How high above which of the seven seas Tristan had told him about? What did the numbers mean if there were no sea near them? Some large mountains have no character while certain smaller ones are noble and holy places with good springs.
Then One Stab released them from the argument by asking Decker to read to him from In the Grip of the Nyika by J. H. Patterson who had also authored The Man-Eaters of the Tsavo, both books about adventures hunting and exploring in East Africa by the British colonel. Decker was bored by the books but Tristan had started years before and One Stab would close his eyes and listen with deep satisfaction to his favorite parts, including the lions that would jump on a moving flatcar to grab railroad workers to eat, the rogue elephant with one tusk that gored the horse named Aladdin, and best of all, the rhinos that died in great numbers from charging the new train that passed through their territory. The latter gave One Stab visions of thousands of buffalo charging the Northern Pacific railroad and tipping over the train. Many years before when he was involved in the tattered remnants of the Ghost Dance movement, One Who Sees As A Bird told him that he had created a new buffalo by throwing a buffalo skull in a sulphurous fumarole at Yellowstone when Ludlow measured the great waterfalls for the government. The trip had been humorous to One Stab who looked at the great mass of falling water and yelled numbers until the disquieted Ludlow asked him to be quiet. Tristan had promised to take him one day to the place where the animal fights the train.