Death Rattle tb-8

by Terry C. Johnston

  With supper done and everyone licking the grease from their fingers and lips, the coffee was ready to pour. At their father’s signal, Magpie and Flea began passing out the shiny, new tin cups Titus had traded off Lucas Murray at Bents Fort.

  “The cup my children give each one of you now belongs to you,” Bass explained. “It is just the beginning of the gifts from my family to you—in return for honoring us with your presence while we announce the Grandfather’s name for our new son.”

  With grunts and murmurs of agreeable good humor, the guests held out their new cups as Titus and Waits each transcribed half the circle with their steamy coffeepots. Many of the men clinked their empty cups together merrily, holding their gifts aloft to salute respect for their generous host.

  When he finally filled his own cup and set the pot down at the edge of the fire pit, Scratch retook his spot beside the oldest among them and said, “Real Bird, will you honor us with a prayer over your pipe before we begin this ceremony?”

  From his beautiful blanket pouch, this ancient warrior and mentor to Rotten Belly and many chiefs took his pipe stem, the bowl, and a large tobacco pouch made from the scrotum of an elk bull. Though many, many winters had turned his hair completely silver, Real Bird nonetheless still possessed a strong “elk medicine” unlike anything his people had ever known. He was a physician and healer, as well as being a diviner who could see into the days ahead and know what would come to pass.

  With his pipe loaded, Real Bird held it before him and offered his prayer, face gazing upward through the wide, black hole where fire smoke rose in twisting spirals into the dark, winter sky. When the old one put the stem to his lips, Scratch picked up a small coal with a pair of iron tongs and placed it atop the tamped tobacco. After the diviner’s prayer, the pipe came next to the child’s father, Titus Bass, then continued on to the left until it reached the doorway, where it was passed back to the second row of guests so that its path continued back to Real Bird. Next it went hand-to-hand along the right side of the lodge, as each visitor offered his own extended prayer of blessing before drawing in his own six puffs of smoke that sent the prayer to the four cardinal directions, and to mother earth and father sky.

  Once the pipe was back in Real Bird’s hands, the old shaman emptied the black dollop and separated bowl from stem. Then he called the mother forward with the infant.

  “Give the child to its father,” Real Bird instructed.

  Titus took the boy into his arms as Waits turned away and took her seat behind the second row of chiefs and headmen, near her two children who were watching in rapt attention from the shadows that leaped and danced upon the dew liner and lodge cover.

  “Take the dressings from him,” the old shaman said.

  Resting the bundle in his lap, Scratch pulled the blanket aside, then loosened the knots tied in the calico that was wrapped around the boy’s genitals to contain his elimination. Titus carefully wiped the child’s bottom with dried moss, then held the infant aloft upon his two hands. Hoisted upward there in the fire’s light, the youngster lay higher than any of them, suspended between the oldest of the band and the Grandfather Above.

  “Father of this child—what is the name the Creator has chosen for the boy?” asked Real Bird in a reedy voice.

  Tears glistened in his eyes and Bass found his throat clogged when he first tried to speak. “I-I have learned his name is Iische.”

  “Jackrabbit?” Real Bird repeated as Waits-by-the-Water silently put her hand over her mouth, her eyes welling up.

  “Yes.”

  Around them many of the guests grunted or nodded to one another to signify their approval.

  Turns Plenty announced, “It is a good name for a boy-child.”

  “His legs are always busy,” Titus explained, “as if he wants to be let down from our arms so he can jump around.”

  “Soon enough he will be,” Real Bird prophesied, then chuckled some as he raised his arm and placed his wrinkled, withered hand on the boy’s chest where Bass held the child aloft. “Iische … I name you by all that is holy to our people. You are loved not only by your father and mother, but your sister and brother. And you will always know the love of all your people.”

  Several of the others openly and loudly offered their praise.

  Then Real Bird continued, “You come from the finest of blood, Iische. In your veins flows the blood of your mother—and through her comes the blood of warrior chiefs: Arapooesh, Whistler … and Strikes In Camp.”

  By now Titus was starting to tremble, not from holding the tiny infant aloft, but from the emotion threatening to overwhelm him as he considered Real Bird’s wise and moving words.

  “And in your veins too flows the blood of your father,” the wrinkled shaman continued. “A man who was not born a warrior, nor born a friend of the Crow … but a man of honor who has become a warrior and many times proved himself a protector of our people. Iische, with your sister and brother you have a great honor to uphold. Your mother has proved she is the bravest of the brave, and your father is our unquestioned friend.”

  Many in the lodge muttered all the louder now in their approval of the old shaman’s words.

  “Our enemies are your father’s enemies,” Real Bird continued. “Our friends are his friends. And his children … are our children. If ever death should claim your father, children—then know that there are a half a hundred of us who will step forward to raise you as he would himself do.”

  Tears were streaming unchecked down Scratch’s face and dampening his beard as he peered across the lodge to find Waits-by-the-Water’s eyes glistening as she repeatedly swiped fingers across her own wet cheeks.

  “lische—may you grow as strong and true and every bit as straight as the Creator intended for you when he sent you to these parents He alone chose to give you, parents who would teach you, protect you, love you,” Real Bird prayed. “Jackrabbit—little Crow warrior!”

  With those special words, the entire lodge roared with one concerted response, “Heya!” Bass folded the naked child back against him once more, so overwhelmed with a gush of emotion. “Come over here, children,” he called and gestured to Magpie and Flea.

  They squeezed behind the second row of warriors to reach a small place made for them now right behind their father.

  “It is time for the gifts now,” he instructed as they sat, his voice still unsteady, clogged with sentiment. “Do you remember those stacks of blankets we dragged up just outside the door this afternoon?”

  “Yes, Popo,” Flea answered with an eager nod.

  “As our guests leave our home, give them each a blanket as a token of our love, our esteem for them honoring us with their presence here tonight.”

  As the first of the leaders and headmen began to stand in the crowded lodge and pulled on their fur coats or blanket capotes, Magpie and Flea threaded their way through the guests to dive outside to make ready their final part in the ceremonies. And when the crowd had thinned enough, Waits-by-the-Water got to her feet and moved over to sit beside her husband near Real Bird.

  By now Titus was struggling with the last knot to retie the calico wrap around the squirming infant—all arms and legs in constant motion.

  “Here, woman of my heart,” Scratch said, his face beaming with pride and love as he pulled the small blanket back over his son and handed the child to her.

  “Iische” she repeated. “It is a very good name for him!”

  “You see these strong legs of his? How they kick when he wants to go find you.” Titus cried with joy. “Your little jackrabbit—I think he is very hungry again!”

  26

  That winter the cottonwoods boomed with the bone-jarring cold … but the worst was yet to come.

  For the next three winters a deep, unrelenting cold was visited upon the north country, keeping the men close to their lodge fires, yearning for spring when they could return to stealing horses, raising plunder, and squandering the finest seasons of their young lives.

>   Far too cold that no tribe did much raiding until the weather finally warmed weeks after the equinox. Altogether, it was a string of four winters unlike any the Crow had ever known—four years when the tribe wrapped itself in a growing sense of invincibility and security that come each winter, no thoughts of danger or guarded wariness need trouble all of Absaroka.

  But through each spring, summer, and into the early autumn before that first freeze … it was a celebration of the old life. Throughout the land those few men who could remember a time before the coming of the whites were growing long in tooth and dim of eye, their shoulders stooped with age and their infirmities, eyes rheumy with their years, their exploits, their memories a great and glorious day now gone on the winds.

  That first of those next four winters was a time that was like no other Bass had experienced among the Crow. And he knew that come a day soon no man alive would ever remember the halcyon days before beaver pelts and buffalo robes changed everything in the northern mountains forever.

  When he had first come among the Absaroka long ago, Titus was as an outsider—wintering with the three thieves who posed as partners. Although befriended by Bird In Ground, the young Apsaluuke with a powerful man/woman medicine, Bass had remained an outsider until he returned to the Crow alone. Eventually he took a Crow woman in the manner of the country, and she birthed their half-breed children. Yet, despite how much his old friend Arapooesh had hoped for the acceptance of his white friend, the band was reluctant to treat him as one of their own. Even after he stood beside his woman in the promising ceremony, or went to avenge the Blackfoot bringing the pox south of the Yellowstone, or when he named his third child in the old manner of things … he still could not shake that sense of aloneness, of standing apart from his wife’s people.

  No, it was not until that next spring after the naming when he did not make ready his horses, did not load burdens upon them, and did not depart for weeks, even moons, on end in that way of a white man. Instead, he stayed. Most of the Crow expected him to pick up and be gone one of those bright spring days, but he stayed. Word among them rumored of the promise he had made to his wife and their children.

  “He has come to the blanket,” someone said. “Now he wants to be one of us.”

  “Perhaps,” others agreed guardedly, “but—we all remember the stories of the Medicine Calf* and how he took to the blanket, only to forsake us when it suited him.”

  “This one is not like Medicine Calf,” another would say assuredly. “Medicine Calf was lured and seduced back to the land of the white men. But the gray-bearded coyote, Waits-by-the-Water’s man … he left nothing behind there in the land of the white men. He claims no family, no friends back there. He knows no other home but this.”

  Titus Bass stayed on, season after season—while other white men had always come and gone, like footloose transients come only in search of the furs before they were gone again. Now the beaver trade had breathed its last—a final, wheezing death rattle all could hear rumble with its final gasp. No more did the Crow happen upon any trapping parties, much less the huge brigades that used to winter anywhere from the big bend of the Yellowstone east to the Bighorn, perhaps as far as the Tongue. The only whites they chanced to see now were a trader and his engages who sat out the seasons in their tiny post at the mouth of one river or another on the Yellowstone.

  Rumors floated into Absaroka of traders far to the south, said to have built their posts somewhere on the lower Green River where, so the Snake and Bannock tribes told Crow hunting parties, Big Throat Bridger had stacked up log walls and begun housekeeping with his Indian family and a few white partners.

  But up in this country, the era of the white man was behind them now. The only white face any of them ever saw outside of that of the post trader’s was an aging, wind- and sun-ravaged face that Titus Bass had dragged around with him for seasons beyond count. He had stayed. Because they saw he did not leave in the way of all other white men, the Crow gradually came to accept him as part of their lives. With every season he became more like them: his children growing up among theirs, hunting with their men, joining with the other old warriors to counsel those young men gathering in war parties or preparing to set off on raids into foreign lands. He and old fighters like him always stayed behind to guard Absaroka, to protect the camp, if need be to put their lives between the enemy and their women and children.

  While the young men rode far and wide carrying forth the glory of the Crow, it was always the old warriors who stood as the last great fortress of Absaroka—arrayed like a bulwark there against the many Blackfoot to the north, the Cheyenne on the south, and those Lakota who were migrating out of the east. The old men knew what the land of the Crow had always been … and they stood ready to defend what they prayed Absaroka always would be. So Titus Bass stayed.

  How often in those circles of the seasons did he look back on those glorious days following the naming ceremony!

  With the help of his children, each cold morning Scratch loaded up one of the packhorses with two great bundles of goods and walked through the camp. At the poorest of lodges the three of them would stop and he would ask what that family could most use—a new, thick blanket, perhaps? Or maybe a kettle? Some cloth for a new dress or to wrap up a young child?

  “A man who holds too tightly to his riches,” Titus reminded his children during their daily ritual, “he will forever stay a poor man in the eyes of others. But a man who lets his riches flow from his fingers—”

  “He,” Magpie finished his oft-repeated admonition, “is a man who is rich beyond compare in the eyes of his people.”

  “To give away his wealth,” young Flea repeated his father’s moral, “is what marks a man truly blessed by the Creator Above.”

  So a brass kettle went to some, an iron skillet to others, and those new blankets to shelter one from the brutal cold that had visited itself upon the north country. And there were earrings, rolls of brass wire, and domed tacks for decoration he put in the hands of many of Yellow Belly’s band. A rainbow of colorful ribbon, tiny waxed packets of vermillion, not to mention a myriad of other small tools, decorations, and sewing goods he pulled from his packs like a peddlar as he and the children inched their way through camp for the next four days. Something for every lodge, especially those families who needed the most. This sharing of riches was a lesson like no other he could teach his children.

  What joy it was to return to the lodge when they were done with their day—finding it warmed by a merry fire, the babe asleep, its tummy filled, and Waits-by-the-Water busy at supper, or working her colored quills onto some strip of soft antelope hide, or sewing up a new pair of moccasins for one of the children. More times than not, their feet outgrew old moccasins before those moccasins wore out.

  After nearly a moon at this site, the crier brought word that they would move in two days. Time to pack up, make ready with what they owned, repair old travois hitches. The grass was gone, the firewood too. Besides, the camp had begun to stink with the offal and refuse of those hundreds.

  Less than a dozen slow miles away, the camp chiefs had already decided upon a new site nestled in the lee of a hill. While the spot did not possess any meadows near as free of snow as the last camp, Yellow Belly’s people did find plenty of wood, and some open water where a spring fed a nearby creek even though most every other stream was frozen from bank to bank.

  For days at a time throughout the long and horrid winters, the Crow were imprisoned in camp, if not in their lodges, unwilling to brave the terrible winds and brutal temperatures brought with each new storm. But the weather always moderated, the sun reappeared, and the first, resolute hunting parties embarked in search of what game would be out to feed with the passing of the storms.

  It didn’t take long for him to realize that life was growing easier than he could ever remember it having been. Almost from the time he ran away from the homestead and put Boone County at his back, Titus Bass had made a living from the muscles in his back and t
he sweat of his brow. But it wasn’t brawn that allowed him to endure. Some might well claim he had survived more by virtue of his wits than by his wisdom—so be it. Whether it was toting up bales and baggage at riverport towns on the Ohio or the Mississippi, or sweating over anvil and forge in St. Louis, even unto immersing himself up to the balls in high-country streams little more than liquid ice for months at a time—nearly every function of his life over the past twenty-some winters Out here in the mountains had aged his body that much quicker than it would have aged had he stayed back in those peaceful, predictable settlements.

  In adapting to life with the Crow he lulled himself into peaceful rhythms that most suited a man who had celebrated half a hundred birthdays. Last out the long winters, do some hunting, maybe run a daytime trapline come each spring if he took a notion to and a stretch of country looked promising, help others break and breed the horses all summer through, then pay a visit to the trader downriver when autumn turned the cottonwood to gold …

  “Well I’ll be jigged—you’re a white fella,” exclaimed the man stepping from the open gate of his log post, peering up at Titus Bass before he glanced over those warriors and women, children and old people, all arrayed across the prairie behind Scratch. “From a ways back, you looked about as Injun as the rest of them you brought with you.”

  “Guilty there,” Titus answered with a smile. He held down his hand to the man. “Name’s Bass.”

  “Murray,” he replied with a real burr to the r’s.

  “Met a fella same name as you down to Bents Fort last fall. You related?”

  “Don’t have any relations in the country,” Murray admitted.

  “Mite s’prised to see a man’s built anything here on the river,” Titus said as the last of the Crow came up noisily and started to dismount in the meadow nearby. “If’n it don’t make you no nevermind, this bunch’ll make camp here for the night.”