Ride the Moon Down

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Billy don’t run me, Louis,” Andrew vowed. “We don’t need him no more.”

  “’Sides, I heard him and Campbell ain’t ever coming back to the mountains,” Bass said.

  “That’s right,” Vasquez declared, looking at Scratch evenly. “Seems them two’re buying up land back in St. Louis. Gonna be country gentlemen. So maybe Andrew’s right after all: we ain’t gonna worry ’bout Billy Sublette making trouble for anyone out here no more.”

  13

  Each time Scratch returned to Waits-by-the-Water throughout the rest of that winter, bringing in more beaver pelts from the streams and creeks ribboning the nearby slopes, he couldn’t help but notice how the ricks of buffalo robes multiplied in the fort’s storage house when he rode over to the post for the sound of male voices, some man’s talk, or just to hear a bit more English than he could wring out of his wife.

  And with the mountain man’s every visit to the stockade, young Sublette gently prodded Scratch. “Ain’t you getting a little old to be traipsing off all alone into them snowy hills anymore?”

  Bass’s eyes would twinkle, and he’d wink at the older Vasquez when he replied, “I ain’t so old I can’t take care of myself, you pup.”

  “Man smart as you,” Sublette chided, “I would’ve thought you’d figured out some easier way to make a living.”

  On that Louis Vasquez would agree. “Trapping’s gotta be some of the meanest work any man can do, Scratch.”

  “Hard work never kill’t no man I know of,” he grumbled over the lip of his tin cup.

  Every visit Sublette would say, “Don’t you figure it’s time you quit scratching out a living with your hands, and start making your living with your wits?”

  “I told you, I ain’t fit out to be no trader,” Bass told them, a little stronger this third time, as they sat out a storm.

  At the stockade walls a wolfish wind howled as dawn approached. The sudden subfreezing gale had come on so fiercely that Scratch abandoned their camp and hurried his wife and daughter through the moaning trees that loomed out of the darkness to reach the walls of the fort. In the last few hours Waits-by-the-Water and Magpie had slept snugly in a far corner of the trading room behind two bales of buffalo robes while he had dozed fitfully, his back propped against a pack of beaver in another corner.

  Once Vasquez had awakened, he shoved open the plank door to start some coffee brewing over the fire Scratch kept going in the mud and river-stone fireplace. Two of the fort employees had abandoned their blankets to sit before the flames, kneading their cold hands and inhaling the luring fragrance of brewing coffee.

  It wasn’t long before Sublette himself had appeared at the ill-fitting door where a sudden gust billowed a rooster tail of snow around him as he struggled to shut off the wind, forced to throw his shoulder against the rough planks. Even as he sat and accepted his tin cup from Vasquez, Sublette had begun to prod the old mountain man.

  “When you going to admit you’re just the man Louis and me need to trade with the bands hereabouts?”

  “There’s traders, and there’s trappers,” Titus snapped. “And one ain’t fit to be the other.”

  Then he sat silent while Vasquez moved from man to man with the huge coffeepot, filling each steaming tin before moving on.

  “Pretty plain our friend doesn’t want us to beg him anymore, Andrew,” the Spaniard stated with a wry look of amusement on his face. “The matter’s dead. Isn’t a concern to Scratch that the bottom is getting torn out from under the beaver trade. He doesn’t have to worry with none of it.”

  “Damn right,” Scratch grumbled. “I’ll stay on trapping what I can, trading for what I need. I ain’t been a hired man in almost eleven years. So I ain’t about to sign on now.”

  “You got a family,” Andrew lobbied. “How you figure to provide for them when beaver goes to hell?”

  “Just the way any man would!” he shrieked, then realized how loud his voice had grown and sneaked a quick look at the far corner where wife and daughter slept. Whispering, he continued, “We ain’t gonna starve, long as I can hunt.”

  Sublette asked, “How do you propose to pay for lead and powder? For your coffee and tobacco, sugar and salt—not to mention those nice things your wife deserves?”

  Bass snorted with a grin. “Damn, if you ain’t got a lot of your oily-talkin’ brother Billy in you, young Sublette,” and he hoisted his coffee cup in salute. “Comes to it, a man with a strong back and his wits about him can allays find himself work.”

  Vasquez said, “We got work for you right here.”

  “Dammit, boys—ain’t neither of you give thought I got me a Crow wife? How you ever ’spect me to take a Crow woman into them ’Rapaho and Shian camps?”

  Sublette shrugged, muttering, “I … I—”

  “You doing your damndest to make me think you got horse apples for brains, ain’cha?”

  “It ain’t so foolish as you’re making it out to be,” Sublette argued as he glanced over at his partner, finding Vasquez grinning in his dark face. “You been riding off from her to trap all winter long. Come back to your wife and her camp when it pleases you. Tell me what’s so different with going off to find some villages and trade for their buffalo robes?”

  “Long as there’s beaver in the hills, there’s lots of differ’nce,” he answered firmly. “I’m a man gonna choose how he makes his living, how he works out the rest of his days.”

  Vasquez came over and squatted down next to Titus. “Ever you consider trading with the Crow up north? You’re married to one, gotta know plenty of them bucks too. It might work out well for you and us.”

  But he wagged his head. “Things ain’t so good ’tween me and them Sparrowhawks right now. Ain’t none of you been paying no notice I spent the winter here, ’stead of up there in Absaroka? Don’t that tell you nothing?”

  “Just figured we might help you and you help us,” Vasquez explained. “I traded among ’em myself couple winters ago. Lost two of my men to the Blackfoot, but damn if that spring of thirty-four I didn’t haul better’n thirty packs of buffalo up to Campbell’s post at the mouth of the Yellowstone.”

  “Crow trade ain’t wuth the trouble,” Bass declared. “Not long after the company bought out Campbell and your big brother Billy, they found things so tough up there on the Yallerstone in Crow country that they pulled back from the Bighorn—moved their post to the Tongue.”

  Andrew whistled low. “Don’t say?”

  “’Sides, the company booshways already got ’em someone living with the Crow. He sees they trade their furs off only to him and the company.”

  “That Negra Beckwith,” Sublette grumbled, then grinned. “But I’ll bet you’d do fine working for us up there.”

  Titus dug a fingernail at his itchy scalp. “Trader at Fort Cass, fella named Tullock, he asked me ’bout taking Beckwith’s job last spring.”

  Vasquez leaned close. “Company isn’t happy with him?”

  “Tullock says Beckwith spends too much time making war on the Crow’s enemies,” Bass explained. “’Stead of making them Crow warriors trap beaver for the company. Tullock ain’t figgered it out: up there near the Blackfoot country, there ain’t but one choice for them Crow. They can trap flat-tails, or they can protect their families.”

  “But down here,” Sublette replied with gusto, “Injuns don’t have the Blackfoot to fret over! You agree to be our trader, you can see that the bands in these parts bring us their furs instead of taking them down to the Arkansas, or up to Fort William on the North Platte. You make ’em see how good they’ll have it trapping beaver for us, making buffalo robes for Vasquez and Sublette.”

  “Naw,” Scratch answered with a dull echo as he brought his tin cup to his mouth. Waits-by-the-Water settled beside him. She kissed his cheek and rested her head against his upper arm.

  “Magpie asleep?” he asked her in English.

  She nodded and spoke in his tongue. “Yes. She hungry soon.”

  “Storm’s
’bout played itself out,” Bass said, gazing at that one window in the room where a sheet of thin, translucent rawhide had been tacked over a square hole sawed in the cottonwood logs to serve as a crude windowpane. “Figgered to pack up and move out this morning anyways.”

  “But now the snow will be so deep,” she protested in Crow, gripping his arm fiercely, as if she would physically keep him there.

  “The two of us, we’ve been through worse,” he answered in her tongue. “So don’t you worry. There’s beaver yet—believe me. And I mean to trap my share of it.”

  He set his empty cup down, looking at Sublette and Vasquez. To them he said in English, “I mean to trap my share of what beaver’s left, no matter that traders like you don’t give me much for my plews no more.”

  With winter retreating up the slopes more each day, Bass was able to push farther into the recesses of that eastern front of the central Rockies. As the days lengthened and warmed with the arrival of spring, he stayed out longer, visiting their camp on the South Platte for shorter stays.

  While the sun warmed the earth late those mornings he spent near the stockade walls, Bass loved to grab his daughter and her soft doe-skin ball Waits-by-the-Water had sewn together, slowly trudging hand in hand over to a patch of open ground where they tossed and kicked and even batted the ball across the ground with limbs he snapped off of some deadfall. Although she couldn’t move all that fast, stumbling and pitching into the new grass more than her share, Magpie nonetheless scrambled back to her feet laughing, chirping, eager to continue their exhausting play. Without fail, their game always ended with Titus chasing after his daughter, arms waving over his head, fingers crooked clawlike as he bellowed the battle roar of a grizzly, eliciting ear-shattering squeals and giggles from the little one as she peered over her shoulder at the terrible man-beast pursuing her.

  At the edge of the meadow stood Waits-by-the-Water, always watching, smiling, laughing with them each time either father or daughter spilled, rolling in the cool, wet grass. Day by day Magpie got better at smacking the ball away from him, better at staying on her feet, better able to dodge and sidestep her father until he would collapse on the ground, huffing from exhaustion while she leaped upon his chest to pull at his long hair or his beard.

  “Popo play! Popo play!” she would cry in English, unable yet to call him papa, as she tugged at his graying curls as if to drag him to his feet so he could continue their game.

  “Popo tired, Magpie,” he would mimic her pet name for him. “Popo sleep now.”

  Then Titus would shut his eyes to feign sleep until she bent over his face, gently nudging back an eyelid to inspect his condition. Each time she did, Scratch would immediately roar and leap up, snatching her into his arms, hoisting her overhead, spinning, spinning until he made himself so dizzy he had to collapse again, both of them laughing as Waits-by-the-Water leaped on them both.

  These warming days of early spring were good. Though their times together were brief because the beaver were sleek with winter coats, he did his best to make the most of every visit before he rode off again. One day soon, he promised, they would start north for rendezvous in the valley of the Green, not so much to trade furs off for their necessaries as much as he hankered to see familiar faces again—to learn what old friends had gone under, who had abandoned the mountains, and who remained steadfast as this way of life slowly burned itself out like the final ember in a fire that had flared far too hot.

  Far back in the hills again, he had encountered sure sign of Indians for something on the order of a week, moving his camp a little each day. At first he saw the smoke of distant fires. Then spotted some far-off riders. And even crossed a fresh trail that came down from the saddle above him two days back. Four of them, perhaps five. At least there were five horses. No telling how many riders. Might only be hunters, their packhorses laden with elk as the game grazed farther and farther up the slopes with each week’s warming.

  But for the past two days of making cold camps—chewing on dried meat, going without coffee, and sleeping without a fire—Bass hadn’t run across any new sign of the horsemen.

  “Likely ’Rapaho,” he grumbled to himself now as he pulled the trap sack loose from Samantha’s packsaddle, the way he had grumbled countless times in the last week. “Taking furs in to trade with Sublette and Vaskiss. Get ’em more powder and shot.”

  More than once Bass had returned from his trapping forays to find Arapaho lodges pitched outside the walls of Fort Vasquez, come there to trade for what they needed, perhaps wheedling for what they coveted, willing to steal what wasn’t nailed down when the white men turned their backs.

  Losing some of his hair made his gut burn with an unquenchable hatred for the tribe. Finally Scratch had taken his revenge upon the very man who had scalped him nine years ago.

  How cleansing it had been to exact that brutal retribution.*

  And even though the red bastards had put an arrow in his shoulder more than two winters back, somehow Titus always managed to hurt the Arapaho more than they had hurt him.

  Over the years he had come to learn there were tribes and bands he could deal with, and tribes who meant trouble straight up. Even among the Crow, he had discovered there were good and there were those whose hearts lay in a dark and shadowy place. He figured it had to be just that way with the Arapaho. A man had to be on the watch for Bannock too, a bunch who always did their damndest to run off with what they could. Then there were the Ute, a peaceable enough people. And those Shoshone who had healed him, perhaps saved his life, though Slays in the Night had inexplicably turned on him later: stolen Bass’s horses, tried to kill his old white friend.

  Maybeso there really was good and bad in each bunch, he had begun to believe this long, wet winter. Just as there were good men who were his friends among the company brigades, there would always be men like Silas Cooper or that parley-voo Chouinard. Skin color didn’t make no difference, he allowed.

  Except when it came to the Blackfoot.

  They were the foulest creatures God ever put on the earth. Why, those red sons of bitches had butchered more good men Scratch knew of. If ever there was a tribe that deserved the iron fist of God’s own wrath rubbing them out in one fell swoop, he believed it was the Blackfoot. Evil incarnate.

  Late in the day after lying back in the shadows wrapped in a robe, Titus led Samantha out of hiding, heading downhill for the swampy bottom ground where he set more than a dozen traps that morning. The beaver had been busy there in the shade of the leafless quaky, stirring from their winter lodges to fell the saplings they fed their young. That half of the meadow the sun could not yet reach this time of the year was still slicked with inch-thick ice. The rest of the clearing warmed enough to become a bog by day, but refroze each night.

  Now he needed to gather all his traps before returning to camp; tomorrow he’d be on his way even higher. What with the way the tiny freshets were feeding every little stream, how so many of them wove together to form gushing creeks that spilled on down the slopes, Titus figured the high country had to be melting. And if the snow was softening, then there surely had to be a way of punching his way back into that country where the beaver slumbered, yet undisturbed.

  When he pulled up that first trap, Bass found it empty. Into one of the two trap sacks it went, clattering softly as the iron jaws and chain settled against Samantha’s side where the deer-hide sack hung suspended from the elk-horn pack-saddle. The second clutched a fat, sleek beaver captured in its jaws. Glancing at the sun, he figured he had enough time to skin the animal out there and then. That done, the trap went into the other sack with the green hide he had rolled tightly. On and on he went, collecting at least two beaver for every three traps he pulled from the water—

  Samantha’s ears came up as she froze.

  Bass held his breath. Stilled his hands over the carcass he was skinning in the cold, damp grass beginning to slick with ice here as the sun’s light continued to fade from the sky. For the longest time he l
istened, his eyes searching the brush, the trees, always coming back to look at the mule—watching her eyes, her nostrils, until she finally snorted and dipped her head to tear contentedly at the grass.

  He breathed again, relieved, and went back to trimming the hide from the two back legs, then sawed off the huge tail. But instead of pitching this tail out with the gut-pile, Titus decided to save it, perhaps cook it tomorrow after they had climbed high enough, far enough that no skulking redbelly would follow.

  Gathering tail, hide, and trap, he stood and heard his knees crackle in protest. The years of cold, wading and working in frozen streams, were exacting their toll on his joints. Tortured more every season with aching, icy stabs of pain, he worried how long his body would be able to endure, how long before he could no longer provide for those who counted upon him.

  He glanced over at the big Derringer rifle leaning against the brush, then decided against gathering it up, pushing instead for the pack mule, his arms already burdened. At Samantha’s side he dropped the trap with a clatter, then spread the green, sticky hide across her wide rump, hair side down. On the gummy flesh he laid the beaver tail and quickly rolled it within the hide.

  Pulling back the top of the trap sack, Titus dropped the green plew inside—crying out with pain as the iron tip of an arrow slashed a furrow along his right shoulder, pinning his right hand against the wide wooden packsaddle support.

  Gritting his teeth with that exquisite trail of fire scorching its way up his arm, Scratch jerked around, hearing the war cry burst from the brush at the edge of the clearing. Just one voice. A lone figure among those leafless trees, nocking a second arrow against the bowstring.

  Twisting back to look at his right hand, bloodied and impaled on the arrow shaft that quivered with every pulse of his bright red blood, quivered with every shudder of uncontrollable pain that sent its tremor through the arm. Gently he flexed the fingers a little, finding that every one of them still moved. Just a little, what with the pain it caused—but they moved.