“Many winters have come and gone since you first looked at me,” she said in Crow, gazing at him from beneath those black eyelashes with a profound gratitude for his compliment.
“But you don’t look no differ’nt than the day you come to sit with me aside the Elk River.”*
“But, what of the … sickness that ravaged my face?”
“I don’t see that,” he confessed. “When I look at you I never have seen the sickness scars.”
“How long … you and me … was together?” She struggled some with his American tongue.
“Fourteen. This’ll be fourteen winters since you come to talk with me on that rock beside the river.”
She smiled at him. “You give me four good children.”
“Four?” As suddenly as he spoke the question, Bass realized his mistake and grinned at her, roaring, “Yes! Number four is comin’ this winter near my own birthin’ day!”
How he wanted to be back up in Absaroka long before then. Before the hard winds blew the yellow leaves off the cottonwood standing so stately along the Yellowstone, the Bighorn, on north to the winding valleys of the Judith and the fabled Musselshell. By the time the trembling aspen on the high slopes had begun to shed their leaves of gold and the snowline crept down, down, down toward the rolling prairie where the buffalo had begun to put on winter coats and take shelter in the lee of the mountains. How he hungered to be back among the places where the white man did not come with his women and wagons, with his ways meant to change everything that had been into what those stiff-backed folks demanded it must be.
To be back among a people living generations beyond count in a land that had always been. All a man could do was pray that the soft ones back east would never find a way to change that on him. For, if they did … then life would no longer be worth the living.
If a man could no longer hear the shrill whistle of a red-tailed hawk circling overhead but for the noisy clatter of mankind and his wagons, if he could no longer make out a wolf’s howl drifting down from the nearby hills because the aching stillness of night had been ruined by the nearness of one dirty, stinking settlement after another … then life no longer was sweet. Life was no longer worth the living. Till then, he’d go higher, and higher still, farther and farther back—all to stay away from those who came to take what they could from each new place before they ruined it and moved on. Men like Phineas Hargrove and his kind.
But then, there had always been that kind.
Yet wasn’t he much the same sort? Hadn’t the beaver men come to take until there was little left to take? Perhaps it was so … and it made his heart ache with the weight of that realization.
Still, he brooded, there was a marked difference between the him he was in those early years and the him he had slowly become. When the bottom fell out of beaver and there was no earthly reason to wade ice-cold streams in search of the elusive flat-tails, most all the old trappers had given up and fled: east for what once was, and west in the hope of what might be. But only a handful stayed on, clinging to what could never be again. Maybeso, that proved he was not like the rest, not the sort who came, used, and moved on when they had taken all that could be dug up, cut down, or carried off.
Which got Scratch to wondering just how white a man he was anymore. Gradually, inexorably, more and more with every year, he had come to think of himself as a man in between, someone who could never become a part of his wife’s Crow people, someone who would never again be considered completely white by his own kind. If most of the white trappers had fled back east to old jobs and old ways, and other white folks fled the East in their wagons, desperate to make a new start and new lives for themselves far to the west beyond these mountains … being neither white nor red anymore, just what the hell was he? Merely some mule-stubborn old man refusing to let go of a way of life that was in its death throes?
And all the more important: He worried about what the devil a man would do as he realized he would never fit into that world he saw coming down the trail.
Titus stood at the lower edge of a crusty patch of ground where the sulfur-laden waters had soaked into the earth over the eons, relentlessly leaving behind one thin layer of mineral sediment on top of another.
“That’s boiling water?” asked young Leah.
“Hotter’n your mama has in her kettle,” he explained to his grand-daughter.
As Ghost and Digger traipsed away to sniff at new and intriguing smells off in the sagebrush, both young boys accompanied the old trapper on this excursion to witness a true wonder of nature. Jackrabbit gripped one of his gnarled hands, and Lucas clutched the other. On both sides of him stood the other children, all of them a little in awe at the sight. As soon as the first steamy gush of water spewed from the geyser,* more than a hundred excited, enthralled emigrants came racing out of the camp they were setting up that afternoon near Soda Springs.
Young Lucas asked, “Can I touch it?”
“Don’t you dare,” his mother warned as she stopped behind the child and rested her hands on his narrow shoulders. “That’ll burn you good.”
“Like fire burn me?”
“Wuss’n that,” Titus told his grandson. “Fire just burn you up and kill you quick. That there water burns so you die slow an’ hurtful, Lucas. That ain’t no way for a li’l man like you to go under.”
Leaning forward, Lucas peered around the front of Bass’s legs to get Jackrabbit’s attention. “We can’t go there to play.”
Little Jackrabbit, about the same age as Lucas, shook his head with understanding and confirmed, “No go.”
“No is right,” Amanda said gravely. “You boys play close to the wagon while we’re getting settled for the night. Over there, that side of camp, away from this here hot spring.”
“Where, Popo?” Jackrabbit asked, gazing up at his father.
“You boys play yonder where Lucas’s mama said,” he explained and pointed. “In the sage there, but don’t go far as them rocks.”
The boys started to let go of the old man’s hand as Amanda reminded them, “You two boys stay where I can see you! Hear?”
Lucas was darting off, Jackrabbit at his side in nothing more than a tiny breechclout and moccasins, as the white boy flung his tiny voice over his shoulder. “I heard you, Mama!”
Six and a half days after they had left behind Hargrove’s California-bound party and the headwaters of what the emigrant maps were already calling Bridger Creek on the Bear River Divide, the Bingham-Burwell Oregon Company reached Soda Springs high on the gentle, looping, northward curve of Bear River. From here the train would strike out north-northwest, leaving the river behind, striking overland as they made the last stretch for Fort Hall on the Snake.
Most afternoons all Titus or Shadrach had to do was turn about and look back along the far horizon for a low column of dust rising lazily in the air more than a full day behind, telltale sign of the Hargrove California Company. The ousted wagon master and his faithful supporters had begun to fall farther and father behind every day across the last week, moving at a more leisurely pace now that the Bingham-Burwell party was pushing on ahead without them. As the sun began to slip into the last quadrant of the sky, off behind their left shoulders, the time had come for one of the old trappers to select a camping ground for the night. A spot near wood and water, with enough dry, brittle grass available that the stock would not become too restless because of the lack of forage by morning.
More than four and a half days had passed since Roman Burwell pulled himself out of that wagon bed and rose on his own two shaky legs, standing up to Hargrove long enough for the rest of them to get up their gumption too. Not that any of these farmers weren’t man enough. Just, sometimes, most men need others to prod them, to give them permission to stand up for themselves. If Roman wasn’t the sort who would ever make a charismatic leader, at least he was the kind of man who had inspired others to be what any new land needed.
For those first two painful days after the train broke apart,
Burwell had remained in the back of his wagon as it bounced and rumbled through the valley of the Bear River. And for the last four and a half agonizing days, Roman had mustered the strength to walk beside the plodding oxen, grumbling that as much as it hurt to trudge through the rocky soil, it still was nowhere near as painful as the hammering he had taken in the back of that wagon box, no matter how many comforters Amanda piled around him. The wounded farmer ended up covering the last eighty miles to Soda Springs on foot.
“Pa!” Amanda cried. “Get outta that food box!” She and the Indian women were going about preparations for supper.
“I’m just lookin’ for something,” he admitted as he retreated a step back from the rear gate of the wagon, bumping against his accomplice, Shadrach Sweete. “One’a them sugar bags o’ your’n.”
She eyed him suspiciously as Roman hobbled up, asking her father, “You got a sweet tooth I didn’t know about?”
“Not really. Just thought I’d make the young’uns a treat,” he confessed.
“Sugar? For what?” Roman asked.
“Shad an’ me gonna go fetch some of that soda water in our cups,” Titus explained with a playful grin. “We come back, gonna stir some sugar in.”
Sweete added, “Makes a tasty drink, it does.”
The pair were back at the wagon within minutes, each of them holding two pint tin cups filled with the bubbly water. Scratch asked, “You got my sugar ready?”
Amanda set an enameled-tin bowl on the gate, filled with a mound of sugar. “Here you go, Pa. Something to soothe that sweet tooth of yours.”
“I ain’t got a sweet tooth,” he snapped at her as he dipped a big pewter spoon into the bowl and dragged the scoop over to dump it into the first of the four cups.
Shad watched Scratch stir and stir before he took a sip of the effervescent liquid.
“Needs li’l more,” Titus admitted.
After another heaping spoon of sugar was stirred in, he tried it again. “That’s more like it!” And he handed Shadrach the spoon. “Waits! C’mere an’ try this treat I made for you.”
His wife took the cup from him, sniffed at it, then wrinkled up her nose with a giggle. In Crow she said, “It tickles me!”
“Taste it,” he prodded in English. “Sweet.”
“Like me!” Shadrach said as he finished tasting his and handed the cup to Shell Woman.
Bass took the spoon and began to mix some sugar into the other two cups. “Call them young’uns over here,” he suggested. “All of ’em.”
“You’re gonna make some for every one?” Roman asked.
“Got all the water we’d ever need,” Titus said with a wink. “How much sugar you got for me to drink up tonight?”
Amanda relented and said, “Go ahead on and use the rest of that bag for the children. I figure I’ve got enough left for coffee and baking till we get to Fort Hall.”
“Sugar there gonna be high as a silk top hat!” Bass exclaimed.
“So if we can’t afford the price and have to run out before we get to Oregon,” Burwell commented, “then we’ll drink our coffee straight and eat our biscuits sour!”
“Lemuel,” Titus called the youngster over. “Go fetch us this kettle full of water at that spring yonder where we brung the cups from.”
It wasn’t long before they were all standing at the tailgate, dipping cups in the kettle of cold, bubbling water—mixing in sugar and stirring, taking a drink before passing the cups around—wriggling their noses and giggling with the burst of tiny bubbles.
Scratch looked over the jostling of the children all around them. “Magpie? You see’d your li’l brother and that Lucas?”
“They play out there, Popo,” she said in a passable American, pointing out into the sage bottoms that extended toward the lava flats.
“Maybeso you better go fetch ’em both back here to have a treat with us afore all this sugar gets poured down our bellies an’ it’s gone!”
Titus watched Magpie get in one last long drink before she turned away for the open ground beyond the last wagon, out where the happy shouts of emigrant children rang out.
“How’d you ever find out to mix some sugar in with this water, Titus?” asked Burwell.
“Been so many years ago, I can’t rightly recollect,” he confessed. “You had it fixed like this afore, Shadrach?”
Smacking his lips, Sweete declared, “Many a time I come here, but never had no sugar mixed in. This is some!”
“Years and years ago, ever’ mountain man knowed of Sody Springs,” Titus explained as he cast his eyes around this beautiful, lush camping ground. “When a trapper an’ his outfit was anywhere near, they come camp here and drink all this water they could. This here’s some of the best medeecin a man could want going through him. Works its good right on down my gullet, into my paunch, an’ all the way on out.”
“You’d drink this without the sugar?” Roman inquired of Sweete.
Shad answered, “But this here sugar makes the sody a toothsome treat—”
“Popo!”
Scratch whirled at Magpie’s shrill yell, the sound of it making the hair on his arms stand on end. Something about it that instantly spelled danger and trouble. Everyone around him fell silent too and turned with him to watch the girl dashing toward them, the dogs bounding around her legs. Every few steps she took she twisted the top of her body halfway around to point behind her at the open ground where a small knot of children had gathered, all of them bending at the waist, as if looking down at something on the ground. From all directions, more and more of the children were converging on that tiny group.
“Po-po!”
As she screamed for him a second time and lunged closer and closer, more and more adults at the nearby wagons stopped and watched the girl with grave curiosity.
“She hurt herself?” Amanda said as she stepped around the end of the tailgate, dusting her hands on her apron, then bringing both to her brow, shading her eyes from the late-afternoon sun.
Something in his belly immediately told him Magpie wasn’t the one who was hurt. Not the way that girl was bounding over the sage like a doe antelope, all brown legs and fringed skirt flying. So he looked beyond her, to that wide-open patch of rocky sagebrush flat where the small boys had gone to play. No, he was relieved to see that they hadn’t ventured anywhere close to the boulders as he had warned them not to do. So were the two boys in that handful of youngsters knotted around something on the ground? From this distance, Titus could not make out either one of them in that group as the sun slanted its light from the last quarter of the sky.
He started toward Magpie at a walk, leaving the others standing behind without a word of explanation—acting on a gut-hunch that something was terribly wrong. Everyone in this valley seemed frozen, motionless, just watching. Everyone still but for him and Magpie.
“Popo, Popo, Popo!” she was gasping as her knee-length buckskin dress flapped at her skinny copper legs each time she leaped over some brush instead of dodging around it.
With his next breath Titus broke into a trot for her, suddenly aware of the murmuring voices of those emigrants he was leaving behind at their wagons on both sides of the sagebrush bottom. He still could not make out either of the boys in that bunch of youngsters. Worry became dread and began to claw at him. Titus started running faster.
“Popo, oh, Popo!” she whimpered when she came slamming against him, as he captured her in his arms and clutched her tight.
They were both gasping as he brushed the hair out of her sweaty face, asking, “Where the boys?”
She pointed, gulping deeply for air.
“They hurt? Your brother get hurt?”
“Loo-kass … Popo,” she rasped in a gush. “Loo-kass.” Then she pointed impatiently at the group of youngsters again.
“Lucas?”
Her head bobbed and the tears spilled from her wide, frightened eyes as if a dam had been broken, so suddenly it scared him.
“What!” he yelled down at h
er, sorry for the harshness of it that same instant.
“S-sn-snake,” she sobbed.
“Lucas? The boy got bit?”
She was just starting to nod even as he tore himself away from her. By the time he approached that mute group of children, Titus had no recollection of leaping over or scampering around the sagebrush on his way to them. Nor that the unkempt, dust-coated dogs had turned around and scampered back with him, as if this was some exuberant play. When he came heaving up the youngsters backed away in silence, their white faces gone pale as school paste, eyes so big and every one filled with unimaginable terror. As his moccasins skidded to a halt on the sandy soil, he finally saw the two of them. Jackrabbit was kneeling on the ground, his dusty cheeks streaked with tears as he looked up and saw his father staring down at him in utter shock. Strange, but Titus froze a moment, gazing at the way a few wild strands of his son’s hair stuck to the boy’s dirty, tear-tracked cheeks.
Jackrabbit had both of his tiny brown hands wrapped around Lucas’s right leg, fingers interlaced and their knuckles pale with pressure, clamped just below the knee.
“P-popo,” he croaked, runny phlegm oozing from his nose as he cried.
Slowly kneeling to keep from collapsing under his own weight, Scratch settled on the opposite side of Lucas and looked first into his son’s eyes. “Sn-snake?”
His son nodded.
Then Bass looked into his grandson’s face, afraid—so afraid—of what he might see in those eyes. And his heart broke as he recognized the sheer terror in those half-lidded eyes the moment he leaned over Lucas and caused a shadow to pass across the child’s face. The eyes widened slightly, moved liquidly, eventually found him. That’s when all the terror disappeared from his grandson’s eyes, even though they continued to leak big teardrops from their corners, streams of them washing down the boy’s temples through the dust matted on his face, in his ears and his dirty, corn-silk hair.
“Gr-gran’papa,” he said weakly. “See, Jackrabbit? I told you it’s gonna be all right now …” Then he brought up a sharp, hacking cough. “Be all right now—Gran’papa’s here.”
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