Buffalo Palace tb-2

by Terry C. Johnston

  That was what he began to study.

  Concentrating through the sweat and sand and blood he repeatedly blinked to clear. That particular strip of quillwork running all the way from the top to the bottom of the legging, there at the moccasin.

  His eyes locked onto the toe of the moccasin—finding it had the same central design as the legging strip, the same colors.

  Maybeso like Bird in Ground’s people—those colors were the bastard’s own power, his private medicine in both form and color.

  If he could not move, could not raise a hand … at least he would vow to remember those colors, that pattern, those leggings and moccasins.

  As the black seeped down over his consciousness again, Scratch stared, studied, and vowed he would never forget this warrior who had scalped him.

  Maybe all that was left was for the son of a bitch to come over and finish him off right where he lay. Bass figured that was next, now that the coup had been counted and the scalp taken—just a quick flash of a sharp blade across the windpipe … or the less-than-pretty river rock bashing the side of his head to jelly.

  Just a matter of moments now, he told himself as the black oozed down once more.

  Death would be better than this waiting. Death better than not being able to defend himself. Death was better than …

  Then black was all there was.

  As if it were coming out of a dense winter fog, Scratch heard sound. Sodden and muffled.

  It hurt his head to listen. So instead of giving heed to the noises around him, Bass kept his eyes closed and willed himself back into that warm immersion in nothingness. Everything else hurt too damn much.

  He was dimly aware that more time slipped past. From the blackness he came to dwell on his heartbeat. How it grew in volume to crowd out the gentle rustle of the leaves suspended just overhead in the brush. Thrum-thrum … thrum-thrum. So loud, it pounded at his ears with a growing ache.

  Slowly the awareness of aching grew. He hurt everywhere, so it seemed. There wasn’t a place Bass could not feel pain as the warm bath of that unconscious immersion gradually cooled. Then his left leg and arm began to grow cold. And he sensed the breeze stir across the flesh on the right side of his face—like sunburn.

  How long had he been lying there?

  For some time he remained content to stay right where he was without pushing the ache: suspended halfway between the oblivion and the total awareness he was certain he would know once he allowed himself to awaken.

  Beside him the water continued to whisper. Above him the leaves churkled from time to time as the cool breeze excited them. And from somewhere farther still some birds called. He imagined them sitting on branches somewhere above him, watching him. And with the way some calls moved past him too, Bass imagined them swooping by to look at him sprawled beside the river.

  That’s why his leg had grown so cold. He twitched the foot. Feeling. Yes, the bottom of his left leg lay in the river. It and his left hand. Must be the way I come to rest here on the rocks, on the sand, he thought, painstakingly climbing his way out of the safe, dark pool of nonawareness.

  First the leg. He struggled to drag it from the water there on the damp, sandy bench beside the river. Now for the arm. At first he flicked his fingers in the cool water—fully aware now that he had been right about the river, although his head was turned away from the water—but he had yet to attempt opening his eyes again.

  Behind his lids he saw again a portrait of what he had seen the last time he’d opened them. As if it were being played out slowly—then stopped … slowly again—then stopped. The excruciating remembrance of that warrior scraping at … at his own scalp there beside Titus as he lay wounded on the bank. The Arapaho rose to his feet, stuffing the long brown-haired trophy beneath the narrow leather belt from which hung his breechclout, leggings, and the sheath for that knife as he bent over and swished the weapon in the river before plunging it home in the rawhide sheath.

  That pattern of color on the leggings, across the toe of the moccasins as the warrior turned toward him, took a step his way, then lunged up the bank. And away.

  Lying here now at this moment, Bass squeezed his closed eyes tightly, as if he wanted to dispel the terrible vision that remembrance brought him. Then he decided to draw both eyes into thin slits and allowed that crack of light to penetrate his thick blanket of nonawareness.

  Realizing the shadows had lengthened. Branches and leaves and the trunks of the cottonwood around him—all of it had the colors of late afternoon now. Not the bright, severe colors of midday. Not that last light he remembered seeing on the warrior’s moccasin.

  And now his left eye pained him. Blinking to clear it, he found he could not. So matted with sand and grit, dried sweat, and the solid crust of old coagulate.

  Trying his left arm, Bass found that with some struggle he could drag it out of the water, sweep it around in a wide arc, and then fold the elbow so the damp fingertips reached the eye where that side of his face lay on the sand. There was far too much there to wash off with what little dampness he had brought from the river—but it was enough that he could rub, then rub some more until the eye gradually opened without the pain of grit, opened with a blurry dance, with liquid motion.

  It was late in the day.

  Behind him, where he felt the sun on his back, on the bare flesh of his right cheek, and there on the back of his head—Bass knew the sun was still in the sky, but sinking low. By the length of the shadows, by the colors of the leaves and the tree bark, the texture of the sand near his face and the touch of the breeze against his sunburned flesh—he knew the sun would soon drop behind the tall cottonwoods. Very, very soon.

  And then it would become dark—and he would need a fire.

  His belly rumbled hungrily.

  Then he moved his right leg willfully. Both of them cooperated as he tested his hips by rolling a little this way, a little that.

  All that was left was to move that right arm.

  God—damn! did that hurt.

  Clamping down his teeth, he forced himself to move the arm a little more—causing his empty, rumbling stomach to lurch with the pain. He recognized it as that peculiar nausea the body produced when confronted with unbearable torture. It, too, was something he would push himself through. Like stepping through a door—that’s all he had to do. Take a step: move the arm a little more.

  It was so sore through the whole shoulder, the upper arm, down into the upper part of his chest … maybe just because he had been lying there all this time without moving it, he told himself. Convincing himself that to move it a little more, then a little more after that, all that he did would help. Every inch he managed to drag it up and toward him, every twitch of movement to dispel the numbness would eventually make this exquisite, rising pain a bit more bearable.

  Then, before he realized it, Scratch had both arms beneath him, propped, pushing up, heaving against the weight of his upper body. The right arm shuddered and trembled as it drew his chest up.

  Blinking quickly in the shifting of the sun’s light as he came off the sand, Titus looked down, his head so damned heavy … looked down and saw the dark smudge blotting the sand. Then slowly turned his chin, focused his eyes on his right shoulder there near the arm. That right arm was trembling as it propped him halfway up, Bass realized.

  A puddle of dried blood below him. Sand caked on the right side of his chest where more blood had soaked through the leather of his shirt.

  By then the pain in the shoulder and arm was more than he could bear any longer. As his stomach lurched and he gagged with that first heave, Titus willed his legs beneath him so that he could sit up, hunch forward, and puke out what little his stomach still had in it from a predawn breakfast so, so long ago. The bile coated and burned his tongue. But he got through it.

  Realizing he needed water as he spit the last of the yellow phlegm from his sand-crusted lips, Scratch slowly volved around on his left hip. Pulling himself around with his left arm—remembering tha
t it had been in the water.

  There it was. He dipped that hand back into the cool river. Soaked to the elbow he was already, seeing the dark leather as he brought the first cupped hand to his lips. Savoring the precious drops that didn’t spill as he trembled. Then some more. And more after that—licking his hand each time, sucking on each finger. Every drop like the most delicious taste he had ever experienced upon his tongue—

  A bird flew inches overhead, crying out. Snowflash of tail feathers. Magpie. Come to pick at me, he thought. See if there was anything rotting yet.

  It made the tears come to his eyes as he ruminated on that and sucked the drops off his fingers. How the carrion birds would have picked at his eyeballs, dug away at the bloody rings of crimson blossoming out from the bullet holes, both back and front.

  Looking down at the right side of his shoulder again, the tears flowed easily. Damn good thing the bullet went right on through. Some things just naturally stood out as being lucky, he figured. Other things a man had to work at to find lucky. But with this there was no question. He had stopped bleeding. The holes were too high—the Indian’s round ball hadn’t crashed through his lights. No lung was punctured. And as much as his shoulder hurt, he could move the arm a little.

  Besides, he reminded himself, the shoulder didn’t hurt near as much as his head—

  It was that sudden flare of realization that rocked him to his core.

  That piece of his flesh, that hunk of his long brown hair laying over the warrior’s thigh, being scraped free of blood and gore before it was stuffed beneath the bastard’s belt.

  He took it with him and left me here—figuring me for dead.

  At the same time that Bass’s heart leaped with celebration that the Arapaho hadn’t finished him off with a war club … he grew angry at the warrior, for there was no greater insult, nowhere near the coup, than to take his enemy’s hair. And then Bass became angry at himself for hurting so bad. Not just the back of his skull, but his heart with the shame of it.

  From somewhere in the tender, raw, agonized tendrils of his mind, he knew he had to do something about covering that head of his. Slowly, gradually, Bass brought his dampened left hand to the back of his head. Gingerly he brushed wet, cool fingertips across the sun-fevered skull at first. Strange to find it so hard, so dry. And that, his numbed mind told him, was just the danger.

  Got to cover it.

  Dipping his left hand in the water again, Bass brought the wet fingers to the back of his skull, again and again he tapped them gently on that bare patch of bone where his topknot had once rested. Sensing as he did so that the edges of the wound, his very flesh where the hair was matted with blood, the crust of coagulate and flesh had already dried in a hard, ragged circle.

  Tears came again as he realized he had survived. And told himself he would survive.

  With the left hand he dug into the sand and pushed with both legs to shove himself toward the overhang of some willow where he spotted the rocks. There, back in the cool shadows, atop some of the smooth, round-topped rocks, lay the green topknots on each one.

  With his quaking fingers, he scraped off the first of the cool, damp moss—then brought it to his dry, tortured skullcap. At first the soppy material made him shiver, it was so cold on the open wound. But as he applied a second scraping of moss, then more, the pain gradually subsided. And the ragged wound was soothed.

  The animal snorted—quiet hooves on the rocky bank.

  The bastard had come back!

  Wheeling on his hip, Bass’s head swam, dizzy from such swift motion—fighting to clear his mind. Afraid. Dragging his left hand across the back of his belt, he found his scabbards empty. So fearful was he that Scratch brought both empty hands up into claws. Despite the pain it caused him in that shoulder. Those claws were all he had.

  The animal snorted, and its unshod hooves clicked upon the rocks as it emerged from the brush.

  He held his breath, heart thumping, ready to fight for his life now that it had been spared the first time….

  “H-hannah,” he croaked in a hoarse whisper, the first sound his throat had made all day.

  She stopped, her nostrils flaring a moment, sniffing the air and looking him over as if to be sure it was really him.

  “Come … c’mere,” he said, his voice cracking. “C’mere, girl.” Bass tried to whistle, but barely got out a squeak.

  Her head bobbed once, and she clattered forward on the rocks to stand over him, between her master and the sun. Shading him.

  Bass was no longer alone.

  19

  Just when he was feeling sorry for himself, about the sorriest he’d ever been, Hannah showed up.

  That mule had a head about her, Scratch would tell himself over and over across the next few days.

  As he sat there staring at her for the longest time, not able to believe at first that she was real, no one could have convinced Titus that she wouldn’t eventually come back for him. Deep in his marrow, Bass knew that she had run as far as she had to until the warriors gave up their chase. Then it had merely been a case of her lying low long enough for the countryside thereabouts to clear of brownskins.

  “Likely you moseyed back to stay close enough so’s you could watch me,” Bass murmured late that afternoon as sundown approached. “Waiting to learn if’n I was live, or dead.”

  His affection for her burned all the more warmly in his heart as Bass reflected on what she’d done to take care of not just her own hide, but his as well.

  “And when you saw me moving there by the river,” he told the mule, “you come out of hiding and made your way back to me. Just like a friend. A good … good friend.”

  Slowly it struck him just how little he had left in the world right about then. A year’s worth of prime, seal-sleek beaver plews gone the way of dust on the wind. Now the horses and mules, saddles and camp plunder, along with the lion’s share of what supplies of coffee, sugar, flour, and such he had been toting around since bidding the three farewell far up on the Yellowstone.

  But at least he had Hannah, he thought as he looked up at her there on the riverbank where the mule came to a halt beside him, lowering her head so that he could reach up and rub between her ears—right there at the forelock the way she liked him to do. He had Hannah, the only friend he could imagine he had left in the world to count on.

  There were others—men among Fitzpatrick’s and Sublette’s brigades. But they were so far away in days and distance that he told himself they could be of little help to him now—not in the shape he was in. Whereas before the attack he had planned on heading north to cut one of their trails so that he might end up with a few supplies and a whole heaping of companionship … now Scratch realized he just needed to get himself to anyone who could help him mend, help him heal, then reoutfit him.

  Why, he might be lucky enough to find an old knife among the packs Hannah carried—besides it, he didn’t have a weapon to call upon. The two pistols were gone and his belt scabbards were empty when he had finally come to beside the Little Bear River.

  Again he stared at the mule in amazement. She had returned for him, steadfastly loyal. Yet he and Hannah were nonetheless alone—here in enemy country, with nothing more than one another to rely upon.

  It was enough to make a good man cry … then he remembered the tale the old frontiersman Isaac Washburn had told him. How in his first ordeal Hugh Glass had been mauled good by that sow grizzly, then left beside his own shallow grave with nary a weapon nor a horse. But the second time Glass found himself set afoot in enemy territory along the Platte, Washburn was along to discover just how good Ol’ Hugh felt despite their dire circumstances. Having his rifle, pistol, pouch, and powder—why, all that made a man feel right pert, so Hugh told Isaac.

  “Damn,” Bass muttered, “just look at you feeling so danged sorry for yourself. You ain’t got no gun, that’s for certain. But, by God—you got some fixin’s there in that mule’s packs … and I got you too, girl,” he cooed to her.


  The moss trickled down the back of his neck as he inched forward, reached out, and snagged her long lead rope—thankful it hadn’t become tangled in rocks or brush in her getaway flight, or in her faithful return to him.

  “S-steady, steady girl,” he whispered.

  Gradually he coaxed himself to stand beside her: dragging himself up with that rope, raising his weight with that one strong arm as he got his legs under him, rocking there on the weak, wobbly legs. Then he slowly worked at the knotted rope securing one corner of the dirty canvas covering her packs. He flipped the heavy cover back, seeing what he had been hoping for—then lay against the pack a moment. Closing his eyes, he felt as if he offered a prayer.

  When he had gathered his strength again, Bass worked one-handed at the knot on the rawhide parfleche painted with earth colors in Ute designs and patterns. Pushing back the stiff flap, he reached inside, digging around carefully until his fingers found it.

  Dragging out the old, much-worn rawhide belt scabbard, Titus sighed with relief. Such was his joy that his hands almost trembled as he clutched it, a mist welling in his eyes. Scratch slid the knife out. As worn and well used as it was, he had nonetheless always kept it sharp. A man could never have enough knives around camp. Now Gut’s old knife would likely make a big difference.

  From that parfleche he pulled a bundle of scrap buckskin, pieces of hide Fawn had tanned and smoked and used for garments sewn for him or the boy that winter in Park Kyack. As she had taught him, nothing was thrown away—least of all those odd-shaped pieces left over after making moccasins or clothing. There beside Hannah he sank to the grass and sand. Working the knot loose, he spread the scraps apart as the soggy moss continued to drip down his neck, across his chest, and onto his lap.