Ride the Moon Down

by Terry C. Johnston

  The white shaman wiped a damp cloth across the trapper’s back, smearing the glistening blood from the edges of the wound.

  “All this, to pull out the Blackfoot arrowhead,” she observed wryly, wagging her head.

  Bass had come to fetch her late that morning. When he sprinted into their camp, he was flush with excitement as he told her she must grab Magpie and mount up, to follow him back to the big camp because there was about to occur something he wanted her very much to see. By the time they reached the two huge awnings that were stretched overhead in the cottonwood trees near the bank of New Fork as it meandered toward its junction with the Green River, a boisterous crowd of white men were already encircling that shady spot they were keeping open, holding back those curious members of the Ute and Shoshone who were joining the Nez Perce of Tai-quin-watish and Insala’s Flathead who had come to witness this magic.

  Two tall, muscular trappers trudged in with a thick section of a cottonwood trunk and pitched it onto the grass in the middle of the open ground. Bass had called out to one of the two, saying his name was Meek after the man waved to her husband. By then four men had moved toward the log where the one called Bri-ger settled and removed his faded cloth shirt. As a pair of trappers set a tall shaved pole near Bridger’s feet, the fourth man began to probe with a finger at a spot between Bridger’s shoulder blade and his backbone.

  Then the medicine man waved another out of the crowd, a trapper carrying a small iron kettle filled with water that steamed even as the day’s temperature continued to rise. From it the shaman extracted a short-bladed knife, flung off the excess water, then asked something of Bridger who sat hunched over below him.

  When the trapper shoved that piece of rawhide between his teeth, then gripped both hands around the tent pole, the medicine man laid the point of his knife against a particular spot on Bridger’s back and made his first cut—a gesture that caused every one of the hundreds of onlookers to fall silent at that very instant, the entire circle of them craning their necks forward.

  From time to time the medicine man and the trapper shared a few words; then the knife continued its work.

  And now the medicine man inched around in front of Bridger, kneeling so he could peer closely into the trapper’s eyes, and began to speak as his bloody hands appeared to make signs.

  “What is he signing?” she asked her husband in that expectant hush of the crowd.

  “He isn’t signing,” Titus explained. “Just telling Bridger that the arrow point he’s digging for is stuck deep, buried in the bone.”

  She swallowed hard, vividly picturing that—having seen enough of the iron arrowheads that had wedged and embedded themselves into the thick bones of the buffalo her people hunted through the seasons.

  “He says the tip of the arrow is bent, stuck in Bridger’s back,” Scratch continued. “And Bridger just said he figures that’s why they couldn’t get the arrowhead out three years ago.”

  “Three years,” she repeated, transfixed on the medicine man’s hands as he crooked a finger, describing something to the trapper.

  “The medicine man is telling Bridger it’s gonna be even harder to get the arrowhead out than he first thought.”

  “Why?” She gazed up to pat her daughter’s hand before she stared back at the doctor who was getting to his feet and returning to his work at the trapper’s back.

  “Can’t think of the Crow words for it—but there’s some new bone what’s growed around the arrowhead,” he explained, stabbing a single finger on one hand between two other tight fingers to show her.

  Waits nodded in understanding. “Three years the bone has grown around the arrow, yes.”

  With Bridger chomping his teeth on the chunk of rawhide as never before, the medicine man pressed on with his cutting, delicately working the tip of his knife down and around the wound that was freely flowing now. Then, by slicing sideways and prying slightly, after agonizing minutes of torture the medicine man pulled from the wound a dark, glistening object he immediately held up at the end of his arm.

  Her husband and the others instantly hooted and hollered, screeched and whistled, as Bridger shuddered, huffing deeply after he spit out the thick slab of rawhide. He grumbled at the medicine man who stepped to the trapper’s knee and handed the bloody object to the bleeding man.

  “Goddamn, if that ain’t some!” Bridger commented quietly, as if much of his strength had just been tested.

  “Damn right!” the one named Meek roared as he lunged over to slap the medicine man on the back, then held up the shaman’s bloody arm while the trappers went wild again with their whooping and shrill Indian calls.

  “That was ’bout as slick as warm buff tallow!” her husband bellowed at those old friends of his who stood nearby, these trappers he had traveled the high places with in years gone by before he had chosen to journey the mountains and plains with her.

  Now he turned to her quickly, chuckling, his eyes filled with wonder, his face lit with exuberance as he said, “A friend just told me that medicine man is named Whitman. He’s one who reads the book of God.”

  “A holy man, yes,” she said, finding it made perfect sense for a true holy man to possess such remarkable healing powers. Among her people the spiritual men healed the physical body.

  Bass whispered to her, “The knife cutter just told Bridger he is amazed the arrowhead didn’t cause more trouble in the last three winters … but Bridger claimed his back only hurt when the winter cold was deep and long.”

  “Just as your wounds hurt you a little more with every winter?”

  “As long as I have your fire to warm me, woman—I’ll never mind the coming winters,” he told her, gathering Waits beneath his arm.

  As she gazed up to smile at Magpie, four of her husband’s old friends pierced the crowd that was breaking up and stopped around them. She recognized a few of those words they spoke back and forth as the white men looked upon Magpie with smiles of admiration, touching the girl’s dusty feet or rubbing her bare arm as they cooed at her and jabbered with her husband.

  Bass slipped the child from his shoulders and saddled her on his hip. Cupping her chin in his hand, he asked Magpie in Crow, “You want to come with me to visit my friends?”

  Then it sounded as if he asked the same thing in the white man’s tongue.

  “I don’t think she understands me,” Bass sighed.

  “One day soon she will understand what we say,” Waits explained, taking the child into her arms. She watched her husband turn away and dig among his things in search of something. “And when she gets older, I hope she will know just how special she is to learn two languages while she is still a child.”

  From a rawhide pouch Titus pulled a greasy deck of cards tied with a narrow whang cut from his legging fringe, and said, “With these, sweet woman—I just might win something extra from my old friends in a game of chance.”

  “Chance? Like the game of hand my people play?”

  “Just like it,” and he bent to kiss her. “Wish me your luck so I can bring back a present for you and one for little Magpie too.”

  “Just bring yourself back, husband,” she said with laughter lighting her eyes. “And I will give you a present beneath the blankets tonight.”

  He kissed her again. “Do you realize how special you are? To let your husband go off to gamble with his friends?”

  “A man needs to be with his friends,” she replied. “You are with us the rest of the seasons—I think it is good we come here each summer so you visit your old friends. A man like you—to live alone in the mountains and on the banks of the far rivers away from the village—such a man needs a few good friends.”

  For a moment her husband sighed, his eyes looking over the four white men who stood around them. Then Titus gazed at her with a sad smile and said in Crow, “As I grow older, I greet fewer friends here every summer. So it is right that with the passing of the seasons, what friends I have left grow more special to me, grow more dear in my heart.
”

  “If’n that hoss don’t take the circle!” Elbridge Gray roared as he and the others joined Titus in recounting the missionary doctor’s operation on Jim Bridger four days before.

  Half bent over with laughter, his copper beard dusted with cornmeal, Rufus Graham demanded, “Say it again, Scratch—what-Gabe told that sawbones preacher.”

  “When Whitman asked Bridger why that arrowhead didn’t give him more fits in the last three years”—Scratch could barely sputter between side-aching guffaws—“Bridger tol’t him—meat don’t s-spoil in the m-mountains!”

  All five of them pounded their feet on the ground or drummed their thighs, clutching their bellies as they laughed.

  “Caleb would’ve loved seeing that!” Isaac Simms said with a great chuckle, then realized the sad import of what he had uttered.

  “Damn them red buggers anyways!” Bass swore as they all went serious with the flicker of a jay’s wing. “Cutting down a good man like Caleb Wood—right in his prime.”

  For a few moments the five grew thoughtful, staring at the ground, or out at the sky, perhaps up at the leaves dancing in the warm breeze that wound its way through the American Fur Company camp.

  Finally Solomon Fish said, “Jack would’ve bust his gut to stand there and hear that story too.”

  “Shit,” Titus bawled with a huge smile. “Mad Jack was the sort stepped right up there and offered to cut that goddamned arrow right outta Gabe’s back for him his own self!”

  The others looked up to find Bass grinning, and in an instant all of them were chuckling again. It was a good feeling, being there among old friends who had stood at his back when together they had faced down Comanche and Blackfoot. Now these friends sprawled around the fire, drinking their potent whiskey, smoking harsh trade tobacco, and stuffing themselves with the beans, cornmeal, and pumpkins Lucien Fontenelle’s mules had packed all the way from the settlements.

  “That’s purely some, fellers,” Scratch declared, fighting the sob in his throat as the group fell silent once more. “Chirk up, boys! It shines to laugh when you’re thinking ’bout an old friend. What would Mad Jack and Caleb think of us if we was to get all mopey and down in the tooth whenever we was to ’member on them?”

  “Bass is right,” Elbridge reminded them as he turned those slabs of aromatic pumpkin frying in his skillet with a fragrance that reminded them all of a home long ago left behind. “’Specially Jack.”

  Scratch bobbed his head. “Hatcher was the life-lovin’ fool now. And Caleb loved playing the sourpuss for Hatcher too.”

  “Ain’t that the saint’s truth?” Isaac agreed, wiping more of the dark yellow-brown streaks of tobacco juice into his pale, whitish beard. “When Jack was gone and Caleb took over this bunch, why—that’s when Caleb started getting a funny bone hisself.”

  “Damn them Blackfoot,” Bass growled, brooding again on how the four had described Caleb Wood’s horrible death at the hands of the Blackfoot early this past winter.

  Ever since Scratch had thrown in with Jack Hatcher’s bunch back in the summer of twenty-seven, one by one they had been whittled away: first by Rocky Mountain tick fever, then two had decided they would fare better hanging back to Taos with their Mexican wives, and finally their last two leaders had fallen to the enemy—Hatcher in the Pierre’s Hole fight*and now Wood had gone under as Bridger’s brigade hacked its way back out of Blackfoot country. Where they had once been ten—now there were but four. And as much as they had hoped their lot would improve by throwing in with Bridger’s men seasons ago, things hadn’t gotten any better at all.

  “Damn good thing Jack ain’t around to see what’s become of the mountains,” Solomon grumbled. He swiped at his hatchet of a nose dotted with huge pores forever blackened with fire soot and dirt.

  “Trader’s got us crumped over a barrel with his high prices,” Scratch groaned.

  “And our beaver ain’t ever gonna be wuth much anymore,” Rufus added with a faint whistle between those four missing teeth.

  “Time was, we free men was the princes in this land,” Elbridge declared beneath that big bulb of a nose scored with tiny blue veins. “But now we’re so poor we’re barely hanging on with our toenails.”

  Simms wagged his head, complaining, “Man cain’t hardly make a living catching flat-tails no more.”

  All too painfully true. This year almost a fourth of Bridger’s and Tom Fitzpatrick’s trappers had declared their intentions of dropping out of the brigades, choosing to return east with the fur caravan, waiting until they reached St. Louis so they would be paid in cash rather than take out their wages in trade goods for the coming season. Hard to believe that more than eighty men, not to mention Fraeb and Gervais—Bridger’s and Fitz’s old partners—were giving up on the mountains!

  “Let ’em run on back,” Scratch had snorted when Elbridge Gray told him the surprising news. “There’ll allays be them what don’t belong out here. I say hurraw for all of ’em skedaddling with their tails a’tween their legs—goddamned flatlanders anyway!”

  At rendezvous this summer there were no more than two hundred company trappers and well less than a hundred free men. For damned sure those Hudson’s Bay men who had followed Thomas McKay and John McLeod there again didn’t count. Where once more than six hundred red-eyed white hellions had run wild with rendezvous fever, buying whiskey and bedding squaws until they were sore-dicked, hungover, and once again deeply in debt … rendezvous this summer paled when compared to those robust carnivals of recent years. Not near the fun, nor near the trade goods and liquor. And even if there had been plenty of supplies and grain alcohol, there simply wasn’t all that many men who could afford the rampant, glazed-eyed sprees of bygone years.

  Plain as summer sun this August of 1835, no longer was there anywhere near the beaver there had been.

  Why, if it hadn’t been for that Presbyterian missionary Dr. Marcus Whitman cutting that iron arrowhead more than three inches long out of a three-year-old growth of bone and cartilage in Jim Bridger’s back, so far there had been little to make this rendezvous remarkable in more than a decade of summer fairs.

  No sooner had he finished running spidery threads of elk sinew through holes he’d jabbed in Bridger’s skin to close the wound than another American Fur trapper stepped up to Whitman and yanked his own grimy shirt off to point at the lump of cartilage hardened around an arrowhead right under his skin—a wound almost as old as Bridger’s. And for the next three days this quiet man of God from the East had entertained one gamy patient after another—both white trapper and redskin alike—performing his minor operations and dispensing calomel to those who had grown bilious, even bleeding others. The Reverend Doctor Whitman had made a lifelong friend in Jim Bridger, and convinced the others that while all the rest of the religious Bible-thumpers who came west for the Nez Perce country were the sort to glower down their noses at the little fun these men allowed themselves every summer at rendezvous, there was at least one missionary who took the chalk.

  It wasn’t long before news began to circulate from the American Fur camp that Lucien Fontenelle’s supply train might well not have made it to rendezvous if it hadn’t been for the good Dr. Whitman. Back along the Missouri, even before turning west along the Platte River Road, cholera had begun to burn its way through the caravan. And though he had little strength remaining in his own reserves, Whitman began to nurse the sick and dying, able to save all but two by the time every last man in Fontenelle’s train had been laid low by that terrible scourge.

  They had lost a month there on the bluffs overlooking the muddy river: at least two weeks to let the epidemic run its course through the hired hands, and another two weeks until the men recuperated enough to continue their journey for the mountains.

  To those unlettered laborers who had muscled Fontenelle’s wagons and mules west, to those illiterate but savvy princes of the wilderness, Whitman became no less than an unvarnished hero. As he began the next three days of recovering from the crude,
open-air surgery, no less a mountain veteran than Jim Bridger himself had declared that the doctor would clearly do to ride the river with.

  That praise was enough for any man jack of them there at the mouth of the New Fork.

  Then, as if having that arrowhead cut out of his back four days ago wasn’t enough, Bridger handed the camps another reason for celebration.

  “C’mon!” the burly trapper bellowed as he lunged back among the blanket bowers and canvas-covered shelters where Bass sat among old friends and company men.

  “Grab yore guns!” roared the flush-faced man scurrying up on Joe Meek’s heels.

  “Injun trouble?” Isaac Simms shrieked as he scrambled to his feet.

  “Shit,” Meek huffed, coming to a halt. “Just bring your guns to shoot off when the marryin’ is done!”

  “M-marryin’?” Rufus asked.

  Robert “Doc” Newell leaned an arm on Meek’s shoulder, huffing as more than fifty company trappers hurried close to hear the news. “Booshway’s give us a half hour to gather a crowd, boys. Then he’s gonna let a ol’ hide-thumper marry him off to a gal he’s took a shine to.”

  “Booshway?” Bass repeated. “You mean that ol’ whitehead Fitzpatrick? If that don’t beat all—Broken Hand’s getting hisself hitched!”

  “Goddammit—Doc here didn’t say nothing ’bout Fitz tying the knot with a squaw!” Meek snorted.

  Scratch shook his head. “But he said booshway—”

  “Bridger, gol-dangit!” Newell bawled. “Bridger’s taking him a bride!”

  Gabe must have been feeling more than pert. What with having that arrowhead cut out of his back, he must have been feeling downright cocky.

  After more than a dozen years in the mountains, after bedding squaws every summer at rendezvous and occasionally of a winter encampment, Jim Bridger likely decided he was ready to settle down with a squaw. And not just the first one that caught his eye, Scratch discovered. This beauty was the cherished daughter of Flathead chief Insala.