Ride the Moon Down

by Terry C. Johnston

  Whistler lowered the hand he had been using to point into the distance. “And he has seen me too. He is waving to me. My brother … he is walking this way. He is coming for me.”

  Whistler had died during that long, cold, cold night.

  By the time Strikes-in-Camp came up the slope to where his father lay, Whistler was unable to speak, but he must have recognized the sound of his son’s voice. They touched hands, gripping one another while the warriors parted and allowed Windy Boy and Pretty On Top to bring the travois close.

  On the far side of that range of hills where they had first spotted the enemy, the Crow war party chose a place for their camp where they built their fires, roasted some of the meat the Blackfoot had dropped in the valley, and put a guard around the eleven captured squaws. Five were tied together, and six were tied in a second group. Except for the quiet sobbing, the low-pitched keening of those women, it was a quiet, subdued camp.

  Little was said the next morning as Turns Plenty ordered that the rest of the enemy horses be rounded up, that more of the travois be brought in with the green hides on them, along with more of the hump ribs and fleece from those buffalo the Blackfoot hunters had killed.

  They would be going home with the squaws as their prisoners, with the enemy’s ponies and more than thirty fresh hides … but also dragging with them the bodies of eleven Crow dead.

  The war party found their village south of the Yellowstone, hard under the Pryor Mountains. For more than an hour the war party stopped to prepare themselves to enter the camp, putting on fresh paint, stringing out the forty-six Blackfoot scalps on lances and medicine staffs. While the others were eager to push ahead, Bass chose to hang back among those who were dragging the eleven bodies behind their ponies. From one of the older warriors he borrowed some red paint, smearing it on his face.

  Pretty On Top, then the ten other riders tending the wounded, stepped up and dipped their fingers into the white man’s palm, taking some of the red ocher and bear-grease mixture to daub across their foreheads, down their noses, over their copper cheekbones, and finally on their proud chins.

  While Turns Plenty led the others into the village, Bass and the eleven brought up the rear of the procession with their war dead. As the column neared the outskirts of camp, women and children poured out to yell and cheer, trilling their tongues in celebration to see so many enemy horses and those robes. Then the first of the women realized she was not finding her loved one among those riders. She had not spotted a familiar face.

  Then another, and another, and more.

  Those eerie, bone-grating wails began as the squaws took to sobbing, the children to crying for lost fathers or uncles or brothers.

  Solemnly the eleven entered the camp where more than three thousand Crow had formed along the route. Now the crowds parted as the travois rumbled slowly through their midst. On both sides of the procession women flung themselves on the ground, wrenching at their hair, wailing to the skies, crying so piteously it made the hair stand at the back of Bass’s neck where the cold wind tousled the ragged ends of the curly hair he had chopped off in mourning.

  As the last man in the march, Scratch desperately searched the throng for Waits-by-the-Water, fearing more than anything that she would not see him and immediately suspect that he was among the eleven dead. Looking for her face in the crowd, any young woman wrapped in a blanket and holding an infant … eager to spot the lodge of Whistler and Crane.

  Of a sudden he spotted her. Relief washed over him as he raised his arm to signal. She saw him, then stepped closer to her mother. At Crane’s other shoulder stood Strikes-in-Camp, supporting his mother as the travois bearing the dead started past. Crane clamped a hand against her mouth, as if attempting to stifle her cry, to swallow down her grief.

  Strikes-in-Camp bent to say something to his mother just before Crane started toward one of the travois, her feet leaden, almost refusing to move.

  Suddenly she crumbled there on the muddy snow, all the strength flushed out of her. Waits and Strikes-in-Camp knelt beside their mother as Bass leaped to the ground, sprinted the last few yards to the woman’s side.

  The trapper turned to Waits as he started to scoop his arms beneath the small woman. “I can carry her to the lodge if you will lead—”

  But Strikes-in-Camp shoved his arms aside. “I will carry my mother to her lodge.”

  Standing and moving back a step, Scratch watched the young warrior lift his distraught mother from the snow into his arms. How tiny Crane looked, how frail and helpless, cradled there in her grown son’s arms.

  For an instant Strikes-in-Camp’s eyes flashed at Bass as he started away with his mother, saying, “You are not of our blood. Go from here. You will never be our blood. You are not part of this family. So you must turn and go from here.”

  8

  At times through the rest of that winter and early spring, Crane’s mourning was almost more than Waits’s husband could bear.

  Torn between her own grief and the love she felt for this white man she did not always understand, over time Waits-by-the-Water learned to relinquish her husband to the lonely hills for days at a time once more. All she knew was how important it was that she was there for him each time he rode back to rejoin the village.

  In those four days following the war party’s return, Crane stayed with Strikes-in-Camp in his family’s lodge. The widow could not bear to enter, much less eat or sleep in, the lodge she had shared with Whistler. But it should only be a matter of time, Waits realized, before her mother would return to her home. After all, it was her lodge. Not Whistler’s.

  She only hoped that her mother would be content to stay with Bright Wings and the children until spring pulled the white man back into the far recesses of the mountains. Until then Waits and Magpie would have a home, a place where the young mother welcomed her man for a night or two each time he rejoined the village. But all too quickly he grew restless, packed up, and rode off again, leaving behind a stack of hides for her to scrape. Those beaver pelts filled her days while he was gone into the hills, along with making repairs to clothing and sewing up extra pairs of moccasins, or fashioning tiny dresses and leggings for little Magpie.

  By the time the war party had returned, Magpie was crawling, able to scoot about the lodge so well that Waits and Bass had to firmly scold their daughter to keep her from the fire pit. And by late winter she was already standing. Then one early spring afternoon as Bass rode back into camp to find Waits and Magpie enjoying the warm sunshine outside the lodge, their daughter stood shakily with Waits’s help, taking those first few awkward and wobbly steps toward her father as he dropped from his pony and Zeke loped round and round them.

  Together all three laughed and hugged there on the damp ground as thunder rumbled across the sky as it did every afternoon at this time of year while the seasons turned. It was a good homecoming that night when rain struck the taut lodge skins like drumsticks beating on a hollow tree. All evening Magpie chattered and lumbered around the fire, falling often, but always climbing back up with a giggle, so happy was she with herself.

  That night Waits again released the animal in her, hungry for his touch, impatient to have him deep and warm inside her. When he had spent himself and they both lay there exhausted by the glow of the fire, Waits-by-the-Water clung to him like a tick burrowed deep in the curly fur of the buffalo. So afraid to let go, but knowing that come a morning all too soon he would be leaving.

  She could not bear to think of how hard it would be to go on if he should die. As much as she tried, Waits was less than successful in squeezing out those thoughts of life after her man’s death, the way Crane now existed without her husband. Would she too go through each day as if made cold to her marrow, feeling small, having no desire to eat, little need to sleep, hardly speaking to anyone, staring off at the hills and beginning to cry for no more reason than a sudden, painful remembrance?

  Each time Bass left them to ride off for some distant stream, Waits-by-the-Water fo
und it harder and harder to wait. To know exactly where her man was going on a hunt or to steal ponies or perhaps to raise some scalps—that was one thing. But not to know where her man was headed when he went in search of the beaver? That was something so altogether different.

  What if her husband was killed by an enemy and his body was left where he had died? What if his pony fell and crushed him and he had to lie there in agony until he drew his last breath? Or what if he was attacked by one of the mountain predators that might scatter his bones?

  She would not know where he was, how he had died, where to find his body before the wolves, a mountain lion, or a great silver-haired bear would tear his body apart. This separation was far more excruciating than when she had waited for Bass and her father to return from Blackfoot country. Each time he left to disappear in his hunt for the beaver, she had no idea of her husband’s fate until he chose to return to the village with more pelts.

  Would she be a widow? Would Magpie be raised without her father?

  Late that spring she decided it was far better that the two of them no longer stay behind when he left for the lonely places.

  “We are going with you when you leave,” she bravely told him this cold, damp night as clouds scudded across that patch of starry sky they could see when they gazed up at the place where Crane’s lodgepoles were joined in a great inverted cone.

  “It would take so much time to gather—”

  “Everything we own is packed,” she explained. “Only our blankets, and these robes. We’ve done it before: with our ponies, we can carry it all.”

  “Yes,” and he grinned at her. “We have done it before. I was planning to do some work trimming the ponies’ hooves—”

  “Then … we can go with you?”

  His face turned gray with sudden concern. “What of Magpie?”

  She rolled onto an elbow, raised herself up, then gazed down at him as her breasts gently brushed the skin of his chest. “Your daughter already rides in the saddle with me.”

  “How long has she been doing this?” he asked with a grin.

  “Long enough.”

  Bass smiled at her. “So behind my back you women have made ready to take to the long trail?”

  She bobbed her head enthusiastically, afraid to tell him just how much she was wanting to leave the Crow village, needing to flee the daily reminder of her mourning mother … afraid to let him know just how much she needed to be with him, no longer able to let him go.

  “Promise me, husband—promise that you will never leave me, never leave us behind with the Crow when you go to trap the beaver.”

  For a long time he peered into her eyes. “That is what you want? You don’t want me to leave you behind with your people?”

  She shut her eyes a moment. “I don’t belong here anymore.” Then opened them, gazing into him. “You are my people now.”

  “So you want to go where I go from now on?”

  “Yes,” she admitted in a small voice, looking away. Then looked back at him again suddenly, saying strongly, “Promise me—that you will never leave me a widow like my father did.”

  He stroked her high cheekbones with his rough hands, then eventually said, “I promise you, woman. If it is what you want, you and Magpie will be at my side wherever I go.”

  “The rest of it—the most important—tell me the rest of your promise to me,” she instructed breathlessly.

  “And I promise … never to make you a widow.”

  Laying her head against his chest, Waits-by-the-Water listened to his breathing, listened to his heart beating for a long time—slowly realizing that she had just made him give a vow no man could keep.

  “Strangers are coming!”

  At that first announcement Bass shot to his feet, dropping the crude iron files he had been using to trim the animal’s hooves, and leaped atop his pony’s back. They raced into the village toward the sound of the excitement.

  A large crowd was gathering on the outskirts of camp, some of the people pointing to a dozen riders slowly making their way up the valley toward the Crow village, leading a handful of packhorses.

  Waits-by-the-Water spotted him, waved her husband over. “Are they white men?”

  Shaking his head, Bass studied the horsemen and said, “They don’t ride like white men. No stirrups on their saddles.”

  “But they are coming from the north,” she replied. “Perhaps they are enemies who are lost and don’t realize they are about to ride into danger.”

  “No, I think these riders have come to do some trading with your people.”

  Within minutes more than fifty Crow warriors had mounted and were loping toward the strangers. When these camp guards were within rifle range, the distant horsemen raised their weapons in the air and fired, puffs of smoke jetting from each muzzle a heartbeat before the booms echoed from the far hills.

  “They come in friendship,” Bass declared, laying his arm around her shoulder in relief.

  No better sign of friendship in this wilderness than for a man to empty his weapon upon approaching a camp.

  The small band of strangers halted as the Crow guards swirled around them. They exchanged handshakes and slaps on the back before the entire group continued for the village. In short order it was plain to see these riders were not only Indian, but Crow.

  “Peelatchiwilax’paake!”* a voice exclaimed in recognition as the horsemen approached.

  But Bass studied the packhorses more than he did the riders. “Appears they’ve got some trading on their minds.”

  Upon entering the village the visitors dismounted as the Crow guards turned aside with their ponies. Stopping near the center of the camp circle, the spokesman for the newcomers gestured for quiet before he started to speak.

  “Friends! Fellow Apsaluuke!” he cried in the Crow tongue. “We bring you good wishes from the River band of Long Hair!”

  That voice.

  Bass stepped closer so he could peer at the speaker, pricked by something recognizable about the man. Whispering to his wife, he asked, “You know him? Ever see him before?”

  Waits wagged her head and shifted a squirmy Magpie in her arms.

  “Where is Yellow Belly, your chief?” the visitor asked.

  “I am here,” the band’s leader exclaimed as he shouldered his way through the crowd. “Who is asking for me?”

  “Medicine Calf,” the spokesman declared.

  Scratch remembered hearing that warrior’s name….

  Yellow Belly stepped closer to the visitor. “You are the one who was taken as a child and returned to Absaroka as a beaver trapper?”

  “So you have heard my story?” Medicine Calf bellowed beneath the huge cap he wore, made from the entire skin of a mountain lion that spilled clear down his back. “Then you know I am one of you, know that your people are my people too!”

  “We have heard the stories of your life with the River band,” Yellow Belly replied. “And how famous you are with the women! Why have you come? Did you bed the wrong woman and now you are forced to leave that village?”

  “No!” and Medicine Calf laughed uproariously. Something about that laugh pricked another familiar chord in Bass. “I have come with presents for the chiefs, goods to trade.”

  “To trade?” Real Bird asked as he stepped up beside Yellow Belly.

  “I come here with these presents and goods from the trading post the white man calls Cass at the mouth of the Iisaxp’uatahcheeaashisee.”*

  Strikes-in-Camp shoved his way forward to ask, “Why did the white man send you?”

  “I work for him,” Medicine Calf answered truthfully.

  Turning to his wife, Bass said, “Now that’s something a mite peculiar. A Crow warrior working for the white trader—”

  The visitor continued. “The trader pays me money to see that the Crow bring their furs to his post.”

  Titus touched his wife’s arm and whispered, “Wait for me here.” Then he parted the crowd and started for the visitor, saying loudl
y in English, “Who does this goddamned trader work for?”

  Medicine Calf wheeled in surprise at the question, his eyes narrowing to a squint in his dark-skinned face. In English he said, “I figgered it had to be a white man asking jest such a god-blamed question! Ain’t no Absaroke gonna know our tongue near that good. Trader hired me, he works for American Fur—”

  Suddenly the English-speaking Crow stopped talking, holding his breath as Bass drew near.

  “By the stars—it’s … yeah, you’re the one called Scratch, ain’cha?”

  Now it was Titus’s turn to be dumbstruck. He stopped, peered the stranger up and down twice, trying his best to recognize something about this warrior called Medicine Calf. “Where the hell do you know me from?”

  “Shit, Scratch!” the newcomer bellowed as he started for Bass, some of his bewildered Crow companions stepping back. “I knowed you from your first ronnyvoo.”

  Now Titus was confused as hell. “Never met me no Crow early as that.”

  “But you knowed me!” the spokesman exclaimed, stopping right in front of the trapper. “You was riding with three fellas—not a one of ’em liked Negras.”

  That hit Scratch like a lightning jolt. This Medicine Calf claimed to know him back of a time when he was riding with Silas Cooper’s bunch.

  Cocking his head to the side warily, Titus asked, “How the blazes you know that?”

  Holding out his hand, Medicine Calf said, “Hell, it’s me, Scratch! I’m Jim Beckwith! D-d-don’t you ’member me?”

  “Beckwith?”

  The mulatto lunged a step closer and snagged Bass’s right hand in his, then pumped mightily. “One and the same, you ol’ dog!”

  “Jehoshaphat—I ain’t see’d you in … by damned—I did hear tell at ronnyvoo you was took prisoner by some Crow what thought you was their long-lost son!”

  The mulatto slapped his chest. “That’s me!”

  Bass pulled Beckwith against him firmly, pounding the mulatto on the back several times before he stood back and took it all in again. “If’n you don’t look like some Crow dandy, all gussied up!”