Ride the Moon Down

by Terry C. Johnston

  “He says to you: it is good that you come to listen—you leaders of the white men who are strangers to this land,” she signed.

  “Many long winters ago when I was a boy, I remember the seasons as good. Then the first white men arrived.

  “Your kind came to our country as no wild creature ever came to our villages before. And we did not understand.

  “The white man did not stay at the edges of our camps like other creatures, but he came straight into our village. He ate the beaver and all the animals in our mountains with his iron teeth.

  “Because the white man has such a great appetite for everything in our country, now my grandchildren and great-grandchildren are hungry.”

  While the old woman signed these last words, her ancient father wiped his watery eyes and clutched a tiny tortoiseshell rattle against his chest as if he had finished. Sweete, Bridger, Bass, and Meek began to rise—but the daughter motioned them to remain.

  “Do not think my father is done. So tired is he with his years, he only needs a little rest now.”

  For a long time the soft, wrinkled eyelids remained closed in that gray-skinned, skeletal face. Then, just when Scratch was growing restless, the medicine man finally spoke again, in even more of a whisper this time, his voice grown all the weaker. Eventually the daughter turned her attention from him to the white men and made sign.

  “If the mountain lion or the great silver bear ever came to our villages the way the white men have … the lion or bear goes down under our arrows and lances.

  “But the eye spirits in my dreams tell me we do not have enough arrows and lances for the many white creatures who have come boldly into our country, you who do not stay on the edges of our camps. My dreams tell me we can never kill all of those wild white creatures who have come to change things forever.

  “We do not understand,” she translated into sign. “Once we were masters in our land. Now we are hungry, and afraid. Above us in our skies, the sun has set on our faces. Night has forever fallen across our land … never again will we ride the moon down.”

  As if she knew he must be thirsty from all the talk, weary from all the effort, the old woman gave her father some water from a horn ladle, then settled at his elbow where she made sign.

  “He is done. All done, what he wants to say to you. Farewell.”

  The next morning the ancient seer was dead. Chances were good that his last words were spoken to some white men he believed were chiefs among their people. While Meek, Newell, and Sweete had joked with Bridger on their way back to camp about Gabe’s being a chief among the trappers, Bass wondered instead why the old man hadn’t sent for the rich or the noble, the holy or the powerful, among the white booshways and traders, sportsmen, and missionaries camped along the Green River.

  Perhaps the old man had no desire to talk to the loftier sort who had never truly penetrated to the heart of the mountains. Maybe he wanted more so to speak to those who had trapped and crossed his land, those who had invaded and thereby changed life as his people had known it.

  Funny—until this moment Scratch hadn’t remembered the old rattle shaker. But now, here among the glittering but dying yellow leaves, watching the rhythms of death slowly overcome the seasons of life, he suddenly imagined that the old man and his people were very much like the beaver. Unlike those tiny worms said to spin their threads of silk for hats, the beaver had to be sacrificed for others to reap their harvest. A man took the hide and discarded the rest.

  The rattle shaker must have figured the trappers had come to his country to take what they wanted in the way of furs and women, discarding everything else when they moved on. Perhaps his people were like the beaver.

  So the old man’s dream began to disturb him in that season of dying before the onset of winter—a terrifying vision of perpetual night that held no hope of a moonset, no prayer that any of them could ride the moon down and bring about the coming of day.

  This autumn, more than any before, Scratch sensed the cold stab him to the marrow.

  “What the hell’s a man call this godforsaken place of yours, trader?” Bass roared as he ushered his wife through the narrow doorway cut into the clay-chinked cottonwood logs and threw his shoulder back against the crude door planks to batten it against the wind.

  Samuel Tullock looked up from the floor where he was sorting through some buffalo robes a handful of Crow warriors had brought in. All six of them stood to peer at the new arrivals.

  “That you, Bass?”

  Tearing the bulky coyote hat from his head, Scratch slapped the fur against the tail of his elk-hide coat, knocking loose a cloud of snowflakes. Despite the best efforts of the stone fireplace at the corner of the small trading room erected there on the north bank of the Yellowstone opposite the mouth of the Tongue River, their every breath was a greasy vapor in the winter air.

  Tullock stepped around the warriors and that scatter of robes as Waits-by-the-Water set Magpie on the floor of pounded earth. As soon as she pulled back the deep hood of her blanket capote, three of the warriors instantly recognized her. She settled onto a small wooden crate, tearing at the knot in the sash around her waist. Bass held out his hand to the trader.

  Tullock shook with him, affectionately laying his frozen club of a left hand on Titus’s forearm. “I ain’t seen a white face in weeks.”

  “Down to ronnyvoo, one of them brigades made plans to spend the winter over on the Powder,” Titus explained as he tore open his heavy coat and dragged it from his arms. “Figgered they’d been through here a’fore now on their way to winter camp.”

  Tullock shook his head and took a step back. With a sigh the former trapper said, “Good to see a white man every now and then. Likely them company boys come through eventual’, if’n they’re in this country. Coffee?”

  “Some for both of us, thankee.” Scratch watched the trader turn and step around the pile of robes, moving behind the group of warriors who had stepped over to chatter with Waits. He caught every third word or so, fast as they were talking—happy and animated. It made his heart glad to see such a smile on her face, hear that cheer in her voice. Back among her own kind.

  “Trading been good?” he asked as Tullock handed a cup down to Waits, passed a second to Titus.

  “Spring was a mite slow,” he admitted. “But it’s been picking up here of late now that the cold has come for certain.”

  “So you ain’t been hurt none closing down your old place and moving over here?”

  “Near as I can tell, these fellas say their people gonna bring in their furs no matter what.”

  The steam of his coffee warmed his face as Scratch held it beneath his chin. “These Absorkees ain’t got nowhere else to go, Sam’l. They ain’t about to ride north through Blackfoot country to trade at the Marias post, so if you wasn’t here—they’d be banging on the gates of Fort Union for powder and coffee.”

  “It ain’t powder and coffee these bucks come for,” Tullock growled. “They don’t believe I ain’t got no whiskey.”

  Titus snorted with laughter and glanced over at Magpie standing at her mother’s knee, gazing up at the warriors. He sensed that the girl must realize how those men looked more like her than did her father.

  “Whiskey, is it? Ain’t that just what we taught ’em? We done our best to make these poor niggers want what’s the wust for ’em.”

  “You was down on the Green?”

  “Yup, a hot, dry one too, that was.”

  “What’s news from ronnyvoo?” Tullock asked. “Last boat of the year, word down from Union said St. Louis has gone and bought up ever’thing.”

  After sipping at the scalding coffee, Titus declared, “Your outfit owns the hull mountains now. It be a’tween you and Hudson’s Bay.”

  The trader patted, then settled back against a stack of folded buffalo robes. “Beaver’s ’bout done.”

  “I ain’t give up, Sam’l. Gonna ride this horse till it drops dead a’tween my legs.”

  “What brings you
here to the Tongue?” Tullock asked. “You been trapping nearby?”

  “Been up the Rosebud, hung round the big bend for a few weeks till I trapped it out and weren’t wuth the trouble putting my steel in water. We moseyed north for the Yallerstone. Aiming to make it downriver to Fort Union. Look up an old friend.”

  “Who that be?”

  “Levi Gamble. You hear of him?”

  “Never thought you’d know Levi,” the trader responded, stepping over to the ill-fitting door to brush away some of the snow sifting in around the jamb. “A fair man, good of heart too. Gamble’s been out here longer’n most.”

  Nodding, Bass replied, “Met him back in Caintuck when he was on his way to St. Lou. Gonna meet up with Lisa and ride up the river for to be a beaver hunter.”

  “That man’s got him some rings, all right,” Tullock declared with his back turned.

  “Didn’t ever figger to run onto him,” Scratch admitted. “It’s been over twenty-five year now.”

  The trader turned from the door as the wind keened all the more loudly, rattling the crude planks, whining as it shinnied through the chinking, moaning as it sulled around the sharp corners on this low-roofed log hut. “Figure it’s better for you and your family to stay here the night.”

  “Thankee, Sam’l,” Scratch replied. “Gonna be dark soon.”

  “You speak better Crow’n me—why don’t you tell them others they can bed down right here with us if they choose.”

  After translating for the warriors, Scratch removed his buffalo-hide vest from his shoulders. Settling near the fireplace, he held out his arms to Magpie. A smile instantly blossomed on her face, her black-cherry eyes glowing as she trundled across the uneven floor, tripping once and catching herself before she reached her father’s arms, giggling as he smothered her face and neck in kisses.

  Two of the Crow followed Waits over to the fire and squatted cross-legged on the ground as the woman leaned against Bass’s shoulder.

  “You will have another child soon,” one of the Crow said, nodding toward Waits’s belly. “Perhaps it will be a boy.”

  Smiling, Titus patted the rounding belly. “Yes. A boy, perhaps.”

  “A good thing, this—your wife birthing a boy,” the second man commented. “He will become a Crow warrior.”

  Scratch took his eyes from the young man and stared at the flames. “Better that the boy become a beaver trapper like his father.”

  “Just who in hell’s asking for Levi Gamble?”

  Gazing up at the man yelling down at him, Scratch craned his neck there beside the wall of that massive wooden stockade rising some twenty feet beside the hulking stone bastion erected at the southwestern corner of the fort. A second and third man now joined the first to stare over the top of those pickets near the bastion’s stone wall. All three studied the visitors in that cold swirl of a ground blizzard.

  For much of the day he and Waits-by-the-Water had struggled through the storm, making no more than a half-dozen miles, fighting to reach the walls as the afternoon light waned.

  “An old friend,” he shouted at the trio above.

  “You speak good English, friend,” a voice called down, the words all but hurtled away before they reached Bass at the foot of the giant timbers. “Better’n any Injun I know can speak English.”

  “Well, now—I figger you for a white nigger too,” Titus growled. “My wife an’ young’un near froze out here, so what say you crawl on down here and let us in a’fore we can’t move no more.”

  “Said you was a friend of Levi Gamble’s?”

  “From a long time ago,” he replied. Bass was relieved when he saw the speaker’s head disappear. The other two-faces peered at him for a few seconds more before they were gone as well.

  The snow stung his eyes as it flung itself against the wall, ricocheted off with a glancing blow and a howl of fury, then hurled sharp, icy shards at him from several directions at once.

  He heard Magpie whimper again inside his coat where he clutched her against his warmth. Patting her back with one hand, Scratch pulled the buffalo robe more tightly around her. The moment the storm had descended upon them that morning, he had stopped, turned the girl around so that she faced him, her little legs straddling him in the saddle. Untying the flaps of his elk-hide coat so he could admit her, he had Magpie loop her arms around him, burying her face and head into the furry warmth of the buffalo-hide vest. When he had retied the coat around her, Bass dragged a buffalo robe across the neck of the pony, positioning it over Magpie’s back, wrapping it securely around their legs as the wind began to shriek through the cottonwoods that lined the northern bank of the Yellowstone.

  Able to see no farther than their ponies’ noses, they had taken the better part of the afternoon to locate a place where they could ford to the north side of the Missouri, upriver from the post. Now they stood waiting on the tall, barren bluff overlooking the muddy river, at the mercy of the cruel wind, their animals caked with a brutal mix of ice from the Missouri and frozen snow.

  “Over here!” a voice called gruffly as the wind died momentarily. “Hurry, goddammit!”

  Through the swirling, wispy gauze of the dancing ground blizzard, Bass spotted a dark rectangle appear in the solid bank of wall timbers. He blinked and the rectangle disappeared. But as that gust of wind died, the dark rectangle reappeared, beside it now a figure swathed in a furry coat, his head like a huge, disproportionate grizzly’s resting atop his shoulders.

  “C’mon!” Scratch snapped at Waits, reaching for her reins.

  Their head-bent, tail-tucked ponies and Samantha required some extra nudging, heels and yanking both, to encourage the animals to move.

  Near the fur-wrapped figure at the gate Scratch dropped to the ground with the girl in his arms. “You got a place in there for these here animals?”

  “How many you got?” the voice grumbled beneath the hood of fur.

  “Six. Less’n I take ’em somewhere back down the bank outta the wind, they ain’t gonna make it.”

  “Bring ’em in,” the man relented. “We’ll make room for the night. Soon as the storm lets up—”

  “I’ll pay for their k-keep,” Bass stuttered, shifting the little girl in his arms when she whimpered with the cold.

  “That your young’un you got in there, mister?”

  “My daughter.”

  Beneath the frost-glazed brow of his bear-fur cap the man peered up at the Crow woman now. “You better get them both in here outta this wind.”

  Scratch watched the man reach out and seize the reins to Waits-by-the-Water’s pony, removing them from Bass’s thick glove. The stranger turned and led the woman’s horse into that narrow rectangle, pushing aside the huge gate only wide enough to admit the animal and its rider who sat hunched over in the howling fury of the storm.

  Hoisting the small child into his arms, Titus struggled to clutch the buffalo robe around them both as he started forward, tripping on the robe and dropping it.

  “Magpie?”

  “Yes, popo?” she said in English, her voice faint, muffled against his chest.

  “I’ll get you warm soon,” he told her as he turned to discover the mule and the other ponies slowly drifting away before the wind, angling from the wall toward the tall fur press, its top completely obscured in the foggy swirl of snow.

  “Get in here, mister!” the stranger bellowed as he reappeared at the gate, waving violently.

  As a gust of wind died, Bass cried out, “Samantha!”

  He tried to whistle, but his swollen, bleeding lips would not cooperate. Instead he called her name a second time, then started for the dark slash in the wall where the man stood holding open the gate.

  Magpie shivered against him. “Popo?”

  “Said I’ll get you warm soon.”

  “Cold. Cold,” she whimpered, shaking against him.

  Of a sudden that word reminded him how Josiah had whispered in his ear in the bloody aftermath of chasing after an old friend, moment
s after killing Asa McAfferty.

  “M-my wife?” he stammered as he inched through the gate the stranger held open.

  “She’s safe. I put her in the trade room round the corner,” the man said, bracing his arm against the wall to his left, propping open the heavy gate. “Take your young’un round there too.”

  His weary arms barely able to hold on to Magpie, his legs stubborn and leaden, Scratch shuffled through the door with Zeke at his heels. As the sudden warmth brushed his bare cheeks, Titus noticed how the shriek of the wind disappeared behind him. This place smelled of coffee and beeswax, gunpowder and new wood slats on the crates of every trade good imaginable.

  “Leave the child with its mother,” the stranger ordered.

  Waits sat side-legged on the floor, wiping the melting snow from her damp face as she pulled back her hood. When he stumbled toward his wife, she looked up, held out her arms. Waits pulled aside the flaps of his coat and vest, reaching inside to grab the child, murmuring at Magpie in Crow.

  He eased the girl into her mother’s lap with a whimper, then turned slowly.

  “C’mon, mister,” the stranger said. “Let’s get them animals put up or they’re lost.”

  It took long minutes of struggle to account for the five horses and Samantha, cajoling them toward the walls, through the gate, then into the crude pen to the right of the gate where they joined some other stock. Together Bass and the stranger tore at the knots lashing their meager possessions and packs of beaver to their backs until everything had been dropped.

  “Now,” the man gasped, brushing some of the frost from his gray beard and mustache, “s’pose you tell me who the hell this friend is what’s looking after Levi Gamble.”

  “My name’s Bass. Titus Bass,” he gasped, winded, weary, and more than half frozen.

  “Bass. Say you know Gamble?”

  “Knowed him a long, long time ago.”

  “How long?”

  “Back to eighteen and ten it were—”

  “Jesus and Mother Mary!” the stranger exclaimed. “How the hell you ’spect a ol’ man to remember that far back? So how you know him?”