Ride the Moon Down

by Terry C. Johnston

  “What did he say?”

  “He scolded me again that I should not have given myself to a white man.”

  Bass gazed down at her belly, touched it, and said, “It’s a little late for that now.”

  She grinned radiantly. “Then I told him you wanted to do your promising before my family, before all my people—whether or not he gave me to you.”

  “You told him I was going to promise myself to you before all your people no matter if he was there or not?”

  “Yes, I said those words to him.”

  “That’s when he agreed?”

  But she wagged her head. “No.”

  “What made him decide?”

  “Not until I told my brother that you were honoring him before all our people. You, the man he hated almost as much as any Blackfoot or Lakota warrior. You, the man he had no good words for. You were honoring him by coming before our whole village to offer him presents, to show our people that my brother was a man worthy of his respect. I told him that you would be showing our people that he was a man of true stature now, not just a young warrior trying to make a name for himself.”

  “And?”

  “I told him how important that would be in front of our village—to see you, a white warrior with many scars and many, many coups, honoring him by asking for me in marriage.”

  “That’s what changed his mind?”

  Nodding, Waits-by-the-Water said, “I think he finally realized that it would be an honor to have you in his family, a man who would offer him presents despite all the bad that he has spoken of you, all the bad he has wished on you.”

  And now, before this hushed crowd, Bass stepped back to the second horse, carefully raising the rolled-up blanket of a brilliant medium blue he had tied across its back. He carefully unknotted two rawhide straps that secured the blanket to a single braided-horsehair surcingle lashed around the horse’s middle.

  Stopping before Strikes-in-Camp, the white man said, “And this blanket is for your mother. I hope that it will keep Crane warm when you are away to fight the enemies who killed her husband, the enemies who killed your father.”

  The warrior touched the blue blanket, laying his palm on it where it rested across Bass’s forearms. “It is a good color. My mother will like this blanket.”

  As Strikes-in-Camp pulled the blanket roll from the white man’s arms, a rifle emerged from the tube of blue wool. The stunned warrior froze with the blanket draped over his forearm, staring at the rifle.

  “What is this you hide in the giveaway blanket?” Strikes-in-Camp asked. “Another present for my mother?”

  Bass smiled, swallowed, his mind scratching to recall those words he had practiced. “This rifle is for the brother of the woman I want to take for my wife. A rifle for the man who is the head of her family now. May it kill many of our enemies, Strikes-in-Camp. This rifle …” And he stopped, dragging a long-barreled pistol from the wide, worn belt he had buckled around his elkhide coat. “And this short gun too.”

  “It … it too?” the warrior asked in surprise.

  Nodding, Titus continued. “Both are gifts for a brother-in-law I honor today as a brave and fearless warrior who stands between his people and their enemies.”

  Like Strikes-in-Camp, the crowd was stunned into silence.

  Quickly passing the blanket back to a comrade, the young warrior first took the pistol, giving it a cursory inspection before he stuffed it into the wide, colorful finger-woven wool sash knotted around his blanket capote.

  Then with both hands Strikes-in-Camp took the smoothbore fusil from Bass’s arms with something resembling reverence. Those more-than-twenty other members of the Sore Lip Society crowded in on both sides, murmuring in admiration, touching the musket’s freshly oiled barrel, its gleaming stock, the graceful curve of the goose-necked hammer that clutched a newly knapped sliver of amber flint.

  Scratch grew anxious, standing there before the warrior, waiting for some words to be spoken, something to be done. Had he gotten all the words right? Oh, how he had practiced and practiced them—

  Suddenly Strikes-in-Camp leveled his eyes at the white man. “These gifts … they are truly fit for the daughter of a chief.”

  “He-Who-Is-No-Longer-Here was not a chief,” Bass struggled with the words, tongue-tied and nervous as a field mouse cornered by the barn cat, “but she is the sister of a man who will be a chief someday.”

  The warrior’s dark eyes actually smiled at the white man. “You came here to honor me, Pote Ani. But in many ways you have honored my whole family. And you have brought honor to our people. The Absaroka are known not only by the strength of our enemies—the Blackfoot, the Blood, Gros Ventre, and Lakota … but we are known by the strength of our friends: the white men who stand with us to fight our enemies.”

  Laying the new rifle in the crook of his left elbow, Strikes-in-Camp reached out and seized Bass’s forearm with his right hand, clutching it fiercely.

  “Now I go to bring my mother to this place. Together we will bring my sister to you. So that there can be what you call the promising. So that she becomes your wife before all our people.”

  Before Bass could respond, Strikes-in-Camp had turned and was moving back through the crowd that parted for him.

  It truly felt as if it took forever, more than an hour—although he realized it was but a matter of minutes before he heard the admiring rustle washing his way through the crowd. Yard by yard he watched the hundreds move aside, every one of them falling silent but for their hushed whispers. Finally those members of the Sore Lips stepped aside. Through their ranks emerged Strikes-in-Camp. Behind him stood Crane. Beside her, Waits-by-the-Water.

  Titus gasped at her beauty.

  Both wore their very best. His wife wore a blue wool dress he did not recognize, something big enough to fit over her swollen belly. Front and back across its heavy yoke were sewn the milk teeth of the elk. Red strips of ribbon were tied across its skirt, each tassel blowing gently with the winter breeze. And Waits had smeared the deep-purple vermilion not only in the part of her gleaming hair, but in a wide band that ran from her hairline down her forehead, continued down the bridge of her nose, and ended at the bottom of her chin. Two more purple lines started at the bottom of her eyes, dropped across the high cheekbones, then ended at the jawbones.

  Scratch found her radiance so stunning that he had to remind himself to breathe.

  Strikes-in-Camp moved aside; then Crane brought her daughter forward. Now Strikes-in-Camp’s wife, Bright Wings, stepped up behind him, the brilliant oxblood blanket around her shoulders. From her arm she took the new blue blanket, handing it to her husband. Strikes-in-Camp passed it on to the white man. Together they unfurled it, and the two of them laid it across Crane’s shoulders as the old woman gazed up into the white man’s face and smiled, her eyes misting.

  Scratch could not remember the last time he had seen her smile. It had been so long ago, before Whistler had led the revenge raid on the Blackfoot. Then he realized that until today Crane had had no reason to smile.

  With her new blue blanket wrapped about her shoulders, Crane reached out, took hold of her daughter’s hand, and raised it waist level, presenting the hand to the white man.

  Without any urging Bass seized Waits’s hand—not sure of a sudden if he would remember all that he wanted to tell her, all that he had rehearsed saying before her family and her people.

  “Among the white man, when two people want to share their lives together, they stand before their families, stand before their friends, stand before a holy man in the sight of the First Maker … and they give promises to the one they love.

  “These promises are not a simple thing the two can easily ignore or leave behind, because their promising is a bond that the friends and family hear them make.”

  He felt his eyes starting to sting with tears.

  “I do not have any family to join me today. You and our children are my only family. But I have friends among your people—friends
I trust to stand at my back when we fight our enemies. From this day on I hope to have many more friends among the Crow.”

  “Before your family, here before your people—I make this promise: that I will protect you, provide for you, shelter you from storm and cold and hunger until I am no more. This promise I will keep all of my days, even unto my final day. Our children will not know want, nor will they know fear. Instead, they will know the love of their family until they are grown and leave us to walk a road of their own making.”

  He reached up with a roughened fingertip and gently wiped that first, lone tear spilling from one of her eyes. Bass wasn’t sure how to read the look in them—so filled with love were they at one moment, filled with surprise at his words the next.

  “I promise myself to you all the rest of my days,” he concluded. “I will be your husband. Will you be my wife, the mother of my children?”

  Then he noticed how she was clenching her bottom lip between her teeth.

  When she finally spoke, Waits-by-the-Water whispered, “I will be your wife, Ti-tuzz. Mother of your children. For all of our days—”

  And he felt her grip him with tremendous force as she quivered slightly.

  , Concerned, he said, “Waits-by-the-Water?”

  “I must go with my mother now—”

  “Your mother?”

  Reaching up to touch his face with her fingertips, Waits’s eyes softened, and she said, “The rush of warm water has come, bu’a.” She looked down at her feet.

  When he gazed at her moccasins below the edge of that blue wool dress, he saw the puddle softening the snow between her feet, how the moisture had soaked the bottom of her leggings and moccasins, how the pool of it steamed in the cold air.

  “I promise you I will stand at your side for all the rest of your days,” she gasped, her face pinching as another cramp swept over her. Crane moved up to take her elbow, to steady her as Waits said, “But … your child will not wait any longer.”

  “This one is so big!” the elderly Horse Woman announced as her bony fingers pushed, prodded, squeezed the belly.

  Waits groaned from the ripping torment within, the stabbing of the fingers without.

  “Sit up now, woman,” Horse Woman commanded.

  Together Crane and the old midwife each pulled on an arm to bring Waits to a sitting position.

  The old one asked, “Do you want to push?”

  “Y-y-yes!” she gasped as the next fiery rush of pain crossed her belly. Crane pulled one arm, then the other, from the blue wool dress they had borrowed from a large family friend. It hung around her neck as she shuddered with the passing of that long tongue of fire coursing through the center of her.

  She knew it would be soon. Her body shuddering with the easing of the contraction, Waits remembered when Magpie was born in that land far, far to the south. “Whwhere is Magpie?”

  Crane explained, “She is with my sister’s family. I told her she will have a baby brother or sister to play with before the sun sets on another day.”

  Growling with the flush of another fiery tensing, Waits blinked away some of the tears in her eyes and watched the old wrinkled woman crawl up close before her with a long stake in her hand, a hand-sized stone in the other. Horse Woman drove it into the bare ground inches from Waits’s knees, in front of the robe she had been sitting upon.

  “Hold on to this,” the midwife demanded, taking both of the young woman’s wrists in her bony hands and yanking them away from the bare, swollen belly, pulling them toward the stake.

  “Hold on—then you can push,” Crane added.

  They pulled the blue dress up and off her head, then quickly draped an old, much-used blanket over her shoulders, stuffing part of it between her shaking legs, beneath her where spots of blood began to appear. Horse Woman and Crane both bent so low, their cheeks rubbed the floor of the lodge, peering between the young mother’s thighs.

  “He comes!” Crane cried out in joy. “He comes now!”

  Suddenly Waits was blowing like a horse after a long run as the pain rumbled through her like a swollen knot that grew bigger, ever bigger. Then she felt as if she were being torn in half and could not think of how she could save herself—

  “Its head is here,” Horse Woman announced gruffly.

  Waits was so faint, gasping with such shallow breaths, wondering how she could hold on to the stick any longer—

  “You are almost done,” Crane cooed beside her daughter, her arm around her shoulders, whispering in her ear. “Remember Magpie. Remember that this will be over soon.”

  “One more push,” Horse Woman demanded. She was hunched over between Waits-by-the-Water’s knees, crouching there with her hands supporting the newborn’s head. “One more—and this child will be here to see you.”

  Starting to groan with the recognition of that next tensing, Waits felt the pain rise like a crack of far-off thunder within her, shoving its way into her throat like summer lightning before it pushed downward with a sudden clap. She was sure this huge child was ripping her apart as the fire became more than she could bear.

  Shuddering, trembling, suddenly collapsing onto her bottom, Waits found she had no more strength left. This child would have to do the rest on its own—

  The baby cried.

  Blinking again, Waits swiped at her eyes swimming in tears, peering at the old midwife crouched between her knees. The gray head pulled back, the nearly toothless mouth grinned, the baggy eyes smiling anew. She held up the tiny squalling newborn, legs and arms pumping, its head thrashing side to side. Down its belly her eyes dropped quickly, finding that purplish white life cord attached to its belly.

  Pushing the life cord aside, Horse Woman held the child up for the young mother’s close examination. “See, woman?”

  Crane was sobbing, her face swimming into view through Waits’s tears. “You have a boy!”

  Breathless, Waits whispered in a weary gush, “Ti-tuzz … has a boy.”

  19

  “I think you should’ve hightailed it outta here while you had your chance, Scratch,” Jim Bridger huffed as he scurried up in a crouch.

  Bass watched his old friend settle in beside him at the breastworks. “And leave you boys to have all this fun?”

  At Titus’s other elbow Shadrach Sweete said, “Maybeso we ought lay back on Titus, Gabe. I been jab-bin’ him ’bout it since he come running in here.”

  “I don’t rightly think you’re an idjit,” Bridger declared with a grim smile. “Just figgered you for more sense when it comes to fighting Blackfoot.”

  “I fit my share of the bastards, that’s for certain,” Titus said. “Ain’t had a year in these mountains what Bug’s Boys hasn’t troubled me and mine.”

  “I tol’t Titus he could still slip off when it gets dark tonight,” Sweete explained.

  “Shadrach,” Bass said with a grin and a doleful wag of his head, “you goddamn well know them red niggers got us surrounded, so there ain’t no slipping off come dark for any coon.”

  “The man’s right, Shad,” Bridger agreed. “There ain’t gonna be no leaving for any of us now. If there’s gonna be a fight with all these here bastards—I for one am sure as hell glad to have Titus Bass and his guns here with us.”

  Scratch nodded at Gabe with appreciation. That simple gesture was all the thanks he needed to express for those words from an old friend. Sweete himself patted Bass on the shoulder, then turned to the side, staring over the brush and log breastworks the brigade had hastily thrown up the day before.

  The very day Titus had ridden into the brigade camp, making a midwinter’s social call on old friends.

  For hundreds of miles around, the land lay locked in winter, frozen and silent. From time to time over the last couple of months Scratch had ventured out to try trapping one river or another, believing that he would find some beaver out of their lodges. But with the hard freeze that held on week after week, even the Yellowstone had turned to ice.

  Restless as a deerfly in hi
gh summer, Titus finally decided he would mosey upriver to visit Bridger’s camp. Before the hard freeze had descended upon this country, Scratch had bumped into some of Gabe’s men scouting for sign of beaver a few miles up Pryor Creek from the Crow village. They had informed him where the brigade had made its camp on the north side of the Yellowstone, just west of the mouth of Rock Creek—no more than a long day’s ride from the mouth of the Pryor.

  A week later he had hugged Magpie, kissed Waits-by-the-Water, and given the little boy-child a squeeze before he was off. Sometimes a man just needed to move.

  At first Scratch had smelled the wood smoke, then spotted the gray tatters of it clinging among the tops of the leafless cottonwoods upriver. From the sideslope of a hill he had spotted the brigade’s camp no more than two miles ahead. It was late of the afternoon, which meant he was saddle weary, hungry, and half-froze for coffee, not to mention how keenly he anticipated the palaver and storytelling they’d do around the fire that night.

  He had nudged Samantha into a brisk walk, reining her down the gentle slope toward the bottomland where he lost sight of the camp as he emerged from the brush along the south bank of the Yellowstone and dismounted. He had dropped the reins and stepped onto the ice by himself. A good ten yards out he stopped, then jumped and stomped, assured the stuff was thick enough for them both.

  Skirting some spongy patches, Bass had gotten the mule to the north bank, the wood smoke grown all the stronger in his nostrils, when his ears caught a sound that shouldn’t have been on that cold wind. Not that trappers didn’t yelp and whoop and holler themselves when they took a notion to … but those voices sure didn’t sound like white men at all.

  He had swung into the saddle cinched on Samantha’s back, pitching his leg over the thick bedroll of two robes and a blanket, and was just settling his left foot in the wide cottonwood stirrup when a screech jerked him completely around—his heart suddenly in his throat as more than two dozen warriors on snorting ponies broke from the brush thirty yards ahead of him. Smack-dab between him and the brigade camp.