“You know where we’re going?” Shadrach had asked him weakly sometime later after they had quartered into the storm’s wintry fury.
Bass had stopped all three horses and pulled the big wool muffler down to his chin. “You got a feelin’ I’m going wrong?”
Sweete shook his head. “I … I dunno. Just take me to Shell Woman, quickest way you can, Titus. Quickest you can.”
“Ain’t much quick about gettin’ anywhere tonight, Shad,” he said, then wished he hadn’t spit out those words. He leaned over, helping his friend get a thick wool scarf adjusted over his face so that it protected everything below the eyes. “There now. Can’t believe you don’t trust a nigger like me after all our years partnered up. You just stay in the saddle an’ you can count on me taking you right to Shell Woman. She’ll have a big, warm fire going for us, and my woman gonna have some hot food waiting for your belly—”
“Shell Woman’s gonna use her power to heal me, Scratch.”
“You ’member that—how she’ll go to work on your arm,” he said as he tugged on the packhorse’s lead rope. “Mend you up just fine.”
“Just listen for her,” Shad said in a raspy voice, muted somewhat by the wool muffler and the growing cry of the wind. “Shell Woman gonna lead us back to camp. All you gotta do is listen.”
The sharp, icy snowflakes slashed at any bare flesh exposed as Titus led them on into the dark, plodding warily across the shifting, icy landscape. But for all that he strained, Bass couldn’t hear anything but the faint keen of the wind as it slinked out of the coulees and whined along the tops of the ridges overhead. That, and the steady, insistent crackle as the icy snow slapped against the fur of his coat and cap. And the snorts of the horses. His had even started to fight the reins.
“Hol’ up there.”
Sweete said nothing, head slung between his shoulders, half conscious, likely half dead, as Bass stiffly lunged to the ground and felt his way up the horse’s neck to its muzzle. Ice was building up, crusting around its nostrils. Poor beast couldn’t breathe, what with the wind slinging that sleety snow at them nearly dead-on. Hammering his blanket mitten against his thigh, Scratch next used the mitten to rub over the animal’s nostrils, then its eyes. Turning in the dark as the snow whipped around them, he did the same to Shad’s mount, then the packhorse. Layers of warm, misty gauze haloed about him as the horses in turn bobbed their heads and whickered in gratitude.
Of a sudden the wind died—he turned on his heel. The hair rose at the back of his neck as the faint sound crept beneath the scarf and the fur cap, snaking its way into his senses. It was a voice. No, something like a voice. As he stood there, rooted to the spot, the wind came up again and he was instantly unsure if he had really heard what he thought he had heard. Maybe words … but he wouldn’t swear to having heard what could be called words. At least not any language he knew of or had ever heard with his own ears.
Bass turned and peered up at Sweete. The way Shad had come awake, his face was raised, turned into the wind—Titus knew he had been listening too. But that wasn’t Shell Woman, he told himself. What had made that sound wasn’t someone who spoke Cheyenne. Scratch had been listening to enough of that tongue from the lips of both his old friend and Shell Woman too that he could recognize what that wind-borne sound wasn’t. He might not know for certain what that noise was that made the hair stand on his arms … but he was for sure what it wasn’t.
“You hear it too?” Shadrach asked.
“Thought it was the wind,” he said guardedly.
“Foller it,” Sweete declared weakly, his head sagging. “It’ll get me to Shell Woman.”
“It’s coming from the wrong direction, Shad. We go off that way, we won’t never—”
“Foller it, Titus Bass,” he gasped in desperation. “If I never ask ’nother thing of you, just foller the voice tonight.”
Stopping right beneath the big man and looking up at Sweete’s shadowy form, Bass argued with himself a moment, unsure if Shad had gone soft-headed from loss of blood. Titus said, “A voice? Sound I heard wasn’t no voice.”
“I ain’t got no strength to fight you,” Shad admitted as his head sagged. “An’ I wouldn’t know the goddamned difference if you took me off somewheres else to die. But, I’m asking this one and only thing of you. Take me to Shell Woman. I know that’s her calling to me in this storm.”
Taking a step closer so that he stood right at Sweete’s knee, Titus reassuringly patted the buffalo robe he had wrapped around the wounded man’s legs to protect Shad from the driving force of the snowstorm. “I ain’t gonna fight you neither, Shadrach. My best sense tells me that sound come from—”
“It was the voice.”
“Awright, the voice … it come from the wrong direction,” Scratch continued. “But, at the same time my good sense tells me to keep pointing our noses off in the direction I had us going, down in my bones something says to trust you on this.”
“Shell Woman’s calling me.”
“Awright, Shad. I’m taking you to her.”
When he settled into the saddle and wrapped that ice-coated half-robe around his legs once more, Bass took his bearings from that eerie call come on the wind, then reined the horses sharply to the left. The wind didn’t feel right against them. The air itself didn’t go down well when he sucked it through the warmth of that blanket muffler. And the horses? They fought him for a while, even though they were no longer nosing right into the storm. Eventually, his horse grew weary of fighting, dropped its head, and plodded on in the direction Scratch took them.
And every time the wind died, he strained to listen—making out the faintest drift of sound. Not no voice, like Shadrach claimed it was. Leastways, no sound he could call human, speaking a language he could put a name to. From time to time as the minutes, then hours, trickled past in an agonizingly slow procession, Scratch made a small adjustment in their direction. Each time the wind itself seemed to take a breath and that eerie sound came out of the dizzying black of that stormy night, he eased over a little more to the right or turned off a little more to the left. And every step of the way the deepening cold came to suck at what reserves he had always thought he possessed. But, that had been when he was a younger man.
So cold it had grown, Bass was sure his mind had started to numb. Having to remind himself to keep his eyes open in narrow slits—watching ahead for the edge of a coulee or an escarpment of boulders they might plunge over. Someone had to keep an eye open, and his ears alert. If they were being beckoned into hell by the devil hisself, at least it would be a damn sight warmer in those diggin’s. Breath by breath, step by rocking, slippery step, they inched into the night, right into the growing fury of the storm … then right when Titus thought he had finally fallen asleep, all his senses so dulled by the cold and the chaotic frenzy of the wind—that wind up and died.
For some reason a small part of him had remained alert—expecting the unrepentant wind to keep on howling around them, whip at their robes and mufflers, bluster at the horses’ manes, hurling icy snow at their eyes again after that momentary pause, but … the wind never rose above a whisper. A quiet, haunting whisper. It was as if Scratch came awake slowly, not with a start, but groggily, eventually becoming aware that all sound had died except for the crunch of each hoof as it plunged forward, the grunting heave of the played-out animals beneath them, the groaning creak of the ice-rimed saddle leather. Scratch had been in blizzards before. Times past when he had tucked his head down and gritted his teeth, riding on through the storm’s battering to safety … but, he could never remember riding himself right on out of one.
This leaving the storm behind, this earth-shaking silence—it was damn sure enough to give a man the shakes, if he hadn’t been shaking with the bone-numbing cold as it was already.
Scratch tucked his head to the side and turned about with slight, leaden movements to look behind them. Back there the snow swirled, the wind still whipping it into a froth. But here the howl was no mor
e than a whimper, a mere shadow of its former bluster. He straightened in the saddle and glanced over at his half-conscious friend. Then he peered ahead once more, his eyes growing wide when he heard that faintest of whispers brought across the icy heave of the land.
Shuddering, he sensed the not knowing give way to those first slight twinges of fear. Ignorance did that to a man, he chided himself. But his scolding served no purpose. He didn’t know what was happening to them, and the not knowing would do everything it could to make him afraid. As the whisper grew inexorably louder, Titus didn’t know if it was really a sound from out there in the black of the storm … or if he was hearing something born of his own imagination, something bred to echo within his own mind. Between his ears, rather than coming to his ears from beyond—
Then it struck him brutally. With that thought of the Beyond, a molten, fluid fear slammed him hard, squarely against the middle of his breastbone with breath-robbing force. Suspicious, he twisted about again to look behind them at that dark bulk of the storm, the immense curtains of billowing ground blizzard—at that spot from which they had just emerged from the torment of its frenzy into this netherworld of near silence.
His eyes opened wide, transfixed on the horizon.
Was that a crack in the dark storm clouds, a crack in the heaving vapors of snow? Had they somehow blundered through that crack in the sky Ol’ Bill Williams had instructed him about so many seasons before? Time was he had thought the superstitious Solitaire was just given to things a mite ghosty. But over time, especially in these years since the bottom fell out of the beaver trade, and those hardy few who had remained in the mountains had been retreating farther and farther from contact with civilized and genteel white society, Titus had encountered one small incident after another—no one of which was enough to make him a believer in Solitaire’s mystical realm—but taken together now they were more than enough for even the most thorny skeptic to believe he was in the presence of the great unexplainable.
In the silence of that heart-stopping moment—overwhelmed with the crystal clarity of pinprick stars exploding against the utter black of the sky and the gaping endlessness of a snow-covered monotony of heaving land—something told him he had not only been lured up to the very precipice of, but sucked right on through, that invisible crack said to exist between the world of a man’s everyday reality and the unseen realm of spirits and haunts, shades and hoo-doos.
Never a man who was incapacitated by the fear of what he could see, Scratch was beginning to think he had forgotten to stay awake, that he had drifted off to sleep in the mind-freezing bluster of the storm and was already in the process of dying … maybe even dead already—now that the roar of the wind had suddenly faded as if a door had been closed behind him. Probably dead, he thought. Maybe this is hell itself, looming right here on the other side of what had always been the sky—a hell of dark and cold, a void absent of all light and warmth. Why, even the stars had never seemed this far away. Was this his dying? Would this cold and ceaseless wandering be the endlessness of all time for him?
Of a sudden his horse jerked its head up and snorted, snapping Bass to attention. His senses responded, tingling, every fiber of him suddenly electrified. Just ahead the shadows shifted. The packhorse whinnied, then Sweete’s animal sidestepped and pulled at the reins warily. Scratch could not remember his mouth ever being so dry.
Slowly a liquid shadow congealed at the horizon, as if a sliver from the black of night had itself oozed down upon the pale luminescence of the snowy, barren landscape. Closer and closer it advanced on Bass as he considered turning one way or another, to flee what he could not fully see. Then, the shadow’s form sharpened on the bluish background hue of the icy snow and gradually became a rider. A huge horse, the figure seated upon it flapping as if with wings. It made him shudder to remember the tales from the Bible learned at his mother’s knee, a terrifying mythology come to haunt a young boy’s nightly dreams with frightful visions of winged horsemen racing o’er the land, bringing pestilence, destruction, doom, and death in their wake.
But … this was only one horseman. Bass looked woodenly left, and right. Only one rider come charging out of the maw of hell—
Its cry was almost human, even childlike. He might almost believe the oncoming creature’s shrill cry called out solely for him.
Surely the maker of that disconcerting sound was attempting to deceive him, to make Titus Bass believe it was a human voice that had reached his ears. Something in that cry discomfited him … but he steeled himself, stiffening his backbone against their impending clash. No, he decided. He would not heed that mournful cry coming from the throat of that devil’s whelp. Instead, he would prepare to fight its cold death with a fire of his own. Scratch clumsily wrapped his wooden hand around the big butt of the pistol stuffed in the front of his belt and pulled the weapon free. He doubted whether the lead ball could harm this winged creature of no substance, merely passing through the horseman—
“Po … !”
That part of the eerie whisper reaching him now was even louder still, as the figure continued to take on more shape, less fluid now.
Scratch’s red horse stepped sideways, then he righted it with a savage tug on the reins. Damned animal was fighting him more now than it had when they were both being mangled in the teeth of the storm. Not a single reason for its actions but pure contrariness, he supposed. No blowing snow clogging its nostrils or blinding its eyes. Only reason for it to fight him was that dumb beasts could damn well act consarn and contrary in the presence of a formless demon. As if the beasts of the earth had some sense that man did not possess which warned them of what might not really be there—
“Popo!”
As the sound reached his muffled ears, Titus turned slightly to look off to his right for Shadrach. The man had his eyes closed, matted with icy snow. Likely sleeping. “You hear that?” he asked.
Sweete did not stir.
“Jehoshaphat,” Bass grumbled, wondering for the first time if Shad was dead and frozen. Losing all that blood. It was the blood, after all, that kept a man warm, wasn’t it?
As that dark figure loomed closer he pulled back the hammer on the pistol by inching it along the wide, tack-studded belt he had buckled around his heavy elkhide coat. From beneath the specter’s hood came a high-pitched, shrill whistle—strange and wavering, not at all human … but a sound Titus felt he knew. All the more uncomfortable again, and that discomfort made a haven for the fear to grow. He realized he could reckon on hea specter’s sound in another place, another time. But the high, shrill whistle did not fit here and now.
Raising the pistol at the end of his wooden arm, he brought the muzzle to bear at the onrushing spirit that had just kicked its horse into a lope, gaining speed across the dull glow of snow left between them.
The haunt whistled again—at which Bass’s horse and the pack animal threw back their heads and whinnied. That proved it to him. This evil spirit had the power to command the dumb beasts of burden, to make them revolt against man.
“G-go b-back to hell!”
As his words croaked from his throat, the specter’s flowing arm came out, and up, yanking back the hood from its evil face—
“Popo! It’s me!”
He blinked. Then again. His mouth gone all the drier. By the everlasting! This screaming hoo-doo had taken on the shape of his oldest boy!
“I’ll send you straight to hell right here and now!” Titus roared angrily, pained to his marrow that this haunt would know exactly how to pierce his heart with fear and confusion—
“Popo! I come out to find you!”
“You go make your magic on some other poor child! I’m half froze an’ I ain’t in no mood for none of it—”
“My mother asked me to—”
“F-flea?” he stammered, baffled by the spirit’s use of the Crow tongue.
“It’s me, Popo!” the youngster pleaded as a gust of wind whipped his long, black hair across his face. The boy brought up
a blanket mitten and tugged the wool muffler off his chin.
“D-d-damn!” Bass shrieked. “It is you, son! What in the name of tarnal truth?” And then he remembered not to shove so much American at his boy, not near so quickly. “What you doin’ here?” he asked in Crow.
“For a long time after it became so cold, so dark, I begged my mother, told her I could find you, but she did not believe me,” Flea explained as he halted his horse and Scratch’s came to a stop alongside it.
“My heart overflows with joy to see you!” Titus bellowed as he leaned woodenly to the side and seized the boy in his arms, squeezing, pounding, hammering the youth exuberantly.
Once Scratch had leaned back and touched Flea’s face with his left hand as if he were unable to believe the boy was really there, he asked, “Your mother did not want you to leave the place where you made our camp?”
“No.”
Shadrach came to a halt beside them, all the horses raising wispy clouds of vapor in that small knot of man and beast. Sweete started to clumsily pull at the wool scarf that had protected his face.
Bass snorted, “So you waited until your mother was asleep, then you left on your own?”
Flea smiled. “I do not think she was really asleep. Only pretending to sleep. She knew how I wanted to come, and I believe she wanted me to find you. It had been so long for the dark, with no moonrise—”
“This means your mother will be angry with you,” Titus said, patting the youngster’s leg. “And she will be angry with me if I don’t punish you for going against her wishes.”
“But I found you.”
“Perhaps that will soften her anger.” Bass pointed off in the direction Flea’s dim hoofprints led toward the horizon, eventually disappearing. “How far did you come to find us?”
“Not far,” Flea declared. “I called to your horses all the way here. I whistled for them too.”
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