“Hunting antelope with my friend’s gun,” he replied with his hands. “I come back, see them riding away. Big, big war party. Dressed like Blackfeet. My lodge is empty. Horses gone. But I still have my gun, and my legs, and a small piece of buffalo robe—so I start following their trail down the Bighorn for the Elk River into Crow country.”
Scratch looked into the eyes of his wife. She nodded slightly to tell him she had understood the import of the Shoshone’s sign language. Then he glanced at Flea.
“Son, take the packs off that red horse there,” Titus instructed in Crow. “Spread those packs among the other three horses. Our friend can ride the red horse.”
He turned and explained to Slays in the Night, “Crow country is dangerous for one lone Shoshone man.”
Slays snorted. “I am old and the rest of my days are on my fingernails. Crow kill me if the Blackfeet don’t. This is all dangerous country now, when a man is ready to die for one he loves. It makes no matter. I am not running away from this one last fight.”
Bringing his hand down on the warrior’s shoulder, Scratch said, “Ride the red horse for now. Until we get your wife and your horses back from these Blackfoot. Maybe they don’t realize they’re headin’ right into the heart of where the Crow are probably killin’ buffalo for winter meat.”
“You want me to ride with you?” Slays asked. “With your family?”
“My friend will be safe with me,” Scratch reassured as Flea led the red horse over. “Now, let’s get movin’ again. My feet get cold standin’ here in this hard wind. We gotta scratch us up a place to stay for the night, somewhere the wind won’t find our old bones!”
“And in the morning?”
“With tomorrow’s sun,” Titus answered in sign, “we’ll follow those tracks to get your woman and horses back.”
But the cold wind that was picking up near sunset had brought with it new snow. Big, fat flakes the size of ash curls had started to fall not long after dark and continued past sunrise. Falling slow, except when the wind gusted like a frantic child, then rested before its next spasm of blustery fury.
Try as they did, neither of them could make out the trail, so snowed over and windblown it had become during that long winter night. But they forged on that following day, and the next two, continuing on down the Bighorn toward the Yellowstone. And by the middle of the fourth day they stopped on the high ground and gazed north into the narrow valley that lay off to the west, discovering a smudge of smoke laying low against the winter sky, hanging in among the leafless cottonwoods.
“That many fires would not be the war party,” Scratch observed. “Not this time of day.”
“No,” Slays in the Night remarked. “War party was riding off there.” He pointed to the northeast.
“The Rosebud, maybe the Tongue, maybe as far east as the Powder too,” Titus said. Then he looked back to the northwest at that smoke and the first dark hints of a pony herd slowly inching about on the white background. “That’s gotta be a Crow camp.”
“This where you go?” Slays inquired.
“Yes. And where you’ll go with us.”
“No,” and the Indian shook his head and pointed north-northeast. “The Blackfeet go that way. I follow them to the end.”
“Come with us to the Crow village, friend,” Bass pleaded, feeling hopeful that he could talk Turns Back and others into helping. “My son-in-law, he will gather friends—many warriors—we will go in search of the Blackfoot who came raiding this year.”
For a long time the Shoshone sat there on the red horse, clutching that old smoothbore Bass had given him seasons before. His breath streamed from his mouth and nose into the subfreezing air as the setting sun struck their backs, riding low in the winter sky. Finally he took his eyes off the north-northeast and they came to rest on Titus Bass.
“All right. We go to this Crow camp where you get help for us to find my wife. You, me—we ride together against the Blackfeet.” Then the Shoshone’s eyes brightened with moisture, glowed with fond remembrance. “You remember old time we fight Blackfeet together?”
He shook his head, failing to recall any time he and Slays in the Night had battled those implacable foes. “I don’t recall—”
Slays licked his lips and interrupted with a stammer as he gave voice to the white man’s words, “Pee … Pierre’s Hole.”
The long-forgotten scenes exploded into view there in his mind. Back in ’32. One of the biggest and finest of summer rendezvous ever held, company brigades and free men joined by many bands of mountain Indians, drawn by the trade goods and the nonstop gambling. A big band of Blackfoot had stumbled onto the white man’s trading fair, forted up, and been surrounded. Mountain men and their allied warriors dashed south down the valley to do their damnedest to wipe out every enemy they could.
“Yes,” he said with something close to reverence as he squinted his eyes and focused on the long-ago scenes. “I remember that now, old friend. A very long time ago—more’n twenty winters now.”
“Long time,” he repeated the white man’s words, then signed, “We were young.”
With a smile, Scratch asked, “How about you an’ me do this for the ol’t days, my friend? We go kill us some goddamned Blackfoot for the ol’t days?”
“Goddamn these Blackfeet!” Slays agreed in American. “We kill. You and me, we kill goddamn sonofabitch Blackfeet!”
With a whoop, Titus shoved heels into his pony and they all started off the high ground, down the first of the long slopes that would carry them toward the cottonwood-wrapped meadows where that Crow village stood. With enough help from Turns Back, Don’t Mix, and the rest of Pretty On Top’s warriors, they could confront any threat from a large Blackfoot war party, inflict a lot of damage, drive their old enemies out of Absaroka, and reclaim Red Paint Rock from her captors. Which would be right and square with the world as he saw it.
If them dragoons at Fort Laramie didn’t know how to exact a little justice from them murdering Mormons who did wrong by Jim Bridger and so many others, or the dragoons simply didn’t have the stomach for it, at least life was still sane and real up here in the north country … up here where a man could still right what wrongs had been done him and his friends.
Being able to right an injustice committed against him by either Brigham Young and his thieving mobs or by a plundering Blackfoot war party was something a man had to count on when there were few things in life that really mattered. Maybe the Trickster, Old Man Coyote, would be capricious enough to punish a man by not allowing him to right a terribly unfair iniquity … but Titus knew the First Maker would never turn His face from His people in a time of need.
“Who is this stranger you bring?” asked Don’t Mix as he led a small party of guards loping up to the newcomers.
“He is an old friend,” Titus explained in Crow. “He was treating me and mine with kindness even before you were born.”
With that characteristic smirk of his, the young warrior studied the old Shoshone. “Who are his people?”
“I am Snake,” Slays in the Night responded in sign without hesitation.
That he understood enough of the Apsaluuke tongue to understand what had been said around him surprised Scratch. Bass touched the rider at his knee and announced to the others, “This is my friend, Slays in the Night. Side by side, he and I fought Blackfeet more than two-times-ten summers ago.”
“He is still a fighter, this one?” Stiff Arm asked.
Just as Slays was opening his mouth to speak, Titus spoke up, “Many days ago my friend’s camp was raided by Blackfeet, not far to the south. His horses and his woman were stolen. I told him I would ride with him to reclaim what has been taken from him by our old enemies.”
Don’t Mix inquired, “Just the two of you are going after these raiders?”
Shaking his head, Titus replied, “No—I want you to come with me, war chief. And strong-hearted others. There are many, many raiders we must chase from Absaroka!”
Most of
the other camp guards whooped at that call to action, causing some of their ponies to jostle and shimmy in nervousness. From the corner of his eye, Scratch saw how Waits signaled him with that particular look in her eye.
“Where is my son-in-law, Turns Back?” Titus asked.
“The last I saw of him,” Don’t Mix answered, “he had just returned from the hills with a deer and was dressing it out over beside his lodge.”
“And my daughter?”
Don’t Mix smiled as he looked first at Waits-by-the-Water, then back to the white man. “She is as beautiful as ever. More so now that she is a mother.”
Waits barely got her hand over her mouth to squelch a squeal of delight.
“This is good news!” Bass roared. “Tell me, have you taken a wife yet?”
With that sly look in his eyes, Don’t Mix said, “My heart was so wounded, and my soul hurt so bad after your daughter married Turns Back … I knew it would take me a long time to heal, a long time before I could ever give my heart to another. But, it wasn’t long after we returned from the big council at the white man’s warrior fort in the south country that I found a pretty girl to help me heal my heart!”
“Has there been the cry of a newborn heard in your lodge?”
“No—but it will be any day now,” Don’t Mix said with a proud smile. “Big as my wife has grown, she must be carrying two—”
“Ti-tuzz,” Waits impatiently interrupted their man-talk.
“Ah, yes,” Scratch said, realizing his mistake. He urged his pony into motion. “We must hurry on to the village to see our daughter … and my wife’s first grandchild!”
THIRTY-TWO
“Enemies!”
Titus Bass did not need to be told.
He had heard those faint, out-of-the-ordinary sounds drifting to him through the cold of that winter’s dawn. Then the first distant cry of alarm. Followed by the muffled hammer of hooves reaching that ear he had lying against the ground in Magpie and Turns Back’s lodge. Had to be a lot of them from the thunder of their coming. That, or the thieves were running off with every horse Pretty On Top’s band owned.
Across the lodge, Flea was hurrying on with his winter clothing, tying one blanket legging to his belt, and then the other. Turns Back hugged Magpie, then touched the cheek of the infant between them, before he threw back the robes and began to dress in the cold stillness of that breathless lodge.
Yanking on the heavy, furred buffalo moccasins over his others, Scratch quickly dragged on the capote, buckled a wide belt around his waist, then pulled the coyote fur hat over his ears. Into his belt with the two knives went his only pair of pistols. Then he turned to the side of the lodge over the bed where he and Waits had slept for the first time last night. Two leather thongs were knotted in loose loops from the narrow rope that held the liner to the lodgepoles. He freed his old flintlock from the loops, bent to scoop up his shooting pouch, then touched her face with his bare fingertips before stuffing his hands in his blanket mittens—
The first gunshot roared from somewhere on the far side of camp.
He bent to kiss her mouth, recognizing the unspoken fear in her eyes.
As Slays in the Night shoved aside the frozen door flap and hurled himself outside, Scratch rolled up onto one knee and started for the door.
“I am right behind you, Popo!” Flea cried as he lunged onto his feet and followed his father into the gray before dawn’s arrival.
All around them in that instant, men were bursting from their lodges to join those few who were already scuffling across the snow, gathering at the middle of the lodge crescent. Loud voices were raised: a few of the clan chiefs shouting orders to their men, others demanding answers for the unanswerable, fragments of songs and sacred chants just beginning as a few took up the reins to their favored war ponies staked securely at a lodge door … and through it all came the high-pitched wailing of the women and the screams of children from the far side of camp.
In that direction, gunfire became steady, hot. Hoofbeats, male voices louder still, and coming their way.
“The enemy has entered the camp!” Pretty On Top called out from behind the lodges.
Suddenly the young chief appeared in view through the frozen, misty air, gauzy and stinging to the skin with sharp and invisible ice crystals. The old friend caught Bass’s eye, waved him on.
Grabbing the white man’s elbow, Slays in the Night said, “That one, he is a brave man. He wants us to go with him into the fight.”
“These are the men who took your wife, your horses,” Scratch explained hurriedly with a rasp. “They have been brought here to your hand, my friend.”
“Yi-eeee!” Slays called out in a shrill voice as he bolted into a run beside the white man.
“Nothing lives long but the rocks and sky!” Titus reminded him as they lumbered across the snow behind others on their way to stem this challenge to their camp. “If this is our day to look at last upon the face of the First Maker … then let it be known that we died protecting everything dear to us!”
By the time they had covered not more than thirty yards, Bass and Slays in the Night rushed up to a line of warriors, most of whom were kneeling against some lodges, firing their weapons against a crescent of unseen, shadowy gunmen. All a man could tell of his enemy was the flicker of some movement, the orange and yellow muzzle flashes of their firearms. Balls whined overhead, slammed through the stiffened, frozen lodge hides, splintered poles. Inside a few of the lodges, tiny voices cried out in terror.
“Some of our people are trapped!” one of the Crow bellowed.
“Cut them out!” Titus roared as he started forward off his cold, stiff knees. “Cut them out of their traps!”
Flat Mouth was there ahead of him, just as a ball whined past his cheek. Wrenching his long and well-worn skinning knife from its scabbard, Titus plunged it into the back of the rock-hard, frost-stiffened buffalo hide of the lodge and attempted to drag the blade in a downward motion. The knife would not budge. Quickly propping his rifle against the lodge, he gripped the knife in both hands and put his weight behind it, managing to slice a five-foot-long laceration in the back of the lodge cover. Even before he could get his knife yanked away from the bottom of the opening, the first child appeared, all legs and arms, terror-filled eyes and screeching throat. Six of them squirted through the opening before he realized Slays was calling to him in the noisy tumult.
Whirling on his heel as a warrior raked a slice open in a neighboring lodge, Scratch found Slays in the Night with Turns Back and Flea—all three of them pointing behind them … back to the side of camp where their lodge stood.
“The enemy!” Turns Back cried in frustration, shaking his smoothbore.
Flea’s breath streamed out of his mouth like a white streamer, “Father! The enemy has made us fools! They have circled around the camp and are attacking our rear!”
“Come, you fighters!” Slays shouted, standing in the open and making a grand target of himself. “Come, my Crow friends! Kill them all!”
A long, long time their peoples had themselves been enemies—but in this dim light, on this ground, Turns Back and Slays in the Night stood fighting a common foe, side by side.
“Go!” Bass shouted at the trio and started toward them across the trampled snow. “Go to the lodge! I am coming!”
The Blackfoot had arranged a fine diversion for their attack on the Crow village: staging their feint on the north side of camp where part of the herd was grazing in a windswept meadow, while most of their attackers plunged in among the lodges on the south part of the village—where Magpie and Waits waited with the children.
When they were no more than ten long strides from the small, smoke-blackened lodge, horsemen swirled out of the mist ahead of them. Evil faces, eyes glaring with hatred. Faces smeared with dabs and streaks of color. Feathers fluttering from fur caps and the hoods to their blanket coats. Bass heard the thung-thung-thung of bows as he raced on, his cold, aching knees protesting. First two, then
more than a dozen riderless horses suddenly careened into view, forcing the four men to leap aside in both directions. Right behind the horses came the first of the Blackfoot raiders—some of them leaning off to swing a stone club or taking quick aim with their short, elkhorn bows, others attempting to aim and pull off a shot with their firearms—
That’s when Titus recognized their cries.
His eyes went directly to the lodge, finding that opening like a black oval in the frost-coated buffalo hides where Waits and Magpie had their faces, watching the battle, waiting for a chance to leap into the open.
“Don’t!” Bass cried as he ducked out of the way of a warrior’s wild swinging of a war club.
The round, stream-washed rock grazed the top of his right shoulder, pitching the white man onto his side in the snow, knocking over a warrior’s medicine tripod erected in front of the man’s lodge. As he rolled onto his hip, he saw Waits already stepping out of the lodge door with Crane positioned under her arm. Magpie was right behind, clutching her babe in her arms.
“Don’t come out!” he screamed at them, his voice high and shrill. “Don’t—”
Waits was already running across the icy rime, hand in hand with little Crane. Her pockmarked face was gray with terror as her moccasins repeatedly slipped on the trampled ground. But still she heaved and stumbled toward her husband. Slowly, slowly lumbering into the open.
“Go back!” he cried, standing to wave at her with that arm. How the shoulder hurt! “Please! Go back inside!”
Behind Waits and Magpie more horsemen appeared out of the frozen mist. Grayish-black forms suddenly squirting between the lodges, weapons leveled, mouths O’ed up in some war cry as their eyes narrowed on a selected target.
Once more he hollered, “Get back inside—”
—as the muzzle of a short smoothbore spit a dirty yellow flame just behind Waits-by-the-Water.
“No-o-o-o-o-o!” he shrieked at the instant Magpie tripped and spilled to the side, almost under a horse’s slashing hooves.
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