Ride the Moon Down

by Terry C. Johnston

  It was die right there, or go under making a stab at pulling his hash out of the fire.

  Without thinking, Titus had banged his heels against the young mule’s flanks. Samantha bolted away, eyes big as beaver dollars, ears standing straight and peaked as granite spires in the nearby Beartooth Mountains.

  Damn, if he hadn’t surprised the bastards by charging right at them. They had milled a moment, ponies whirling as they reined up, then split in as many directions as there were horsemen. Bass had Samantha into the brush again, whipping the mule back and forth through the cottonwoods before the warriors could regroup and turn around to pursue him. But there had been more ahead of him before he’d made it to the end of the gauntlet—wondering every step of the way what the hell he would have-done if he had decided against charging on into that camp, or if he hadn’t had those old friends to run to.

  “Hol’cher fire!” some man had bellowed as Bass burst from the willows and buckbrush, lying low along Samantha’s neck, clinging like a fat tick to the mule that carried him on a collision course for the piles of deadfall, logs, and leafless brush Bridger’s men were stacking up on all sides of their compound at that very moment.

  “It’s a g-goddamned white man!”

  “Bridger!” Scratch had screamed as he neared the breastworks. “Sweete! Ho, Meek!”

  “Damn betcha it’s a white man!”

  Of a sudden a half-dozen of them had shoved their way into the buckbrush wall they had been throwing up, suddenly heaving against the thorny barrier to force open up a narrow path just wide enough for a man to slip through sideways … then forcing it a bit wider … and finally just wide enough that he knew Samantha would make it.

  It seemed as though a many-armed creature had reached up to drag him out of the saddle, so many hands were raised as he brought the mule skidding to a halt inside the brush corral … a sea of faces, all of them fuzzy and out of focus, blurred by the wreaths of frost that clung about every head.

  “I’ll be the devil’s whore if it ain’t Titus Bass!” growled Joe Meek.

  Standing just that much taller beside Meek was Shad Sweete. “Come to pay us a social call, have you?”

  Bass had gotten his land legs back there on the frozen, compacted snow, working his knees a moment to assure himself they would hold his weight after the long, cold ride. “Nawww, you soft-brained niggers! I come to tell you boys you’re plumb surrounded by Blackfoot!”

  Wrinkling his brow with the gravest look of worry Titus could remember ever seeing, Sweete had replied, “Blackfoot? Blackfoot? Where the Blackfoot?”

  “We don’t see no dram-med Blackfoot!” Bridger roared with laughter as he had come stomping up, holding out his bare hand.

  “You niggers are lower’n a bull snake’s belly, thinking you’re so goddamned funny!” Titus had grumbled as he’d knocked Bridger’s hand aside and they embraced quickly. “Man comes riding in here to help you boys, Blackfoot stuck on his tail like stink on a polecat … and all you can do is rawhide him like you’re doing to me?”

  “Don’t take no offense,” Sweete pleaded with a grin as big as sunrise. “Me and Joe didn’t mean nothing by it. Glory, if we ain’t all pleased to see your butt-ugly mug, Titus!”

  “And his guns,” Joe added, slapping the thin man on the back. “If’n there’s a man what shoots center and kills Blackfoot, it be Titus Bass.”

  “We can sure stand to have us ’nother gun, Scratch,” Bridger observed grimly, much of the good humor gone.

  “From what I saw back yonder, you boys need ever’ gun you can get,” Bass replied.

  Sweete shrugged. “Last we figgered a while ago, Gabe and me cipher we’re on the downside of odds twenty to one.”

  With a low whistle, Scratch wagged his head.

  “Good thing you didn’t catch these’r arrers yourself,” George W. Ebbert commented as he stepped up behind Bass.

  He turned, finding “Squire” Ebbert stopping at the rear of a prancing Samantha, three arrows quivering from her bloody flanks. Quickly he snagged hold of her halter, holding it tight just below her jaw as he stroked her muzzle, scratched a moment between her eyes and ears, cooing at her. Then he stepped back to her hindquarters, inspecting the three wounds.

  “I figger I can quit all three of ’em outta her,” Titus proposed. “Ain’t a one too deep the shaft’ll pull off.”

  Bridger winked, commenting, “Just didn’t give ’em a good ’nough target, Scratch.”

  “Don’t ever plan to, neither.” He stood at Samantha’s head again, stroking her neck. “You boys got your stock in here with you?”

  “All of our critters,” Sweete explained.

  “I’ll drop my bedroll and possibles off yonder by those trees—then I’ll cut these here arrows out. Please tell me you’ll have some hot coffee for me when I’m done.”

  Dick Owens poured him a cup as Scratch walked up more than a half hour later. The sun had gone down before Bass had begun his bloody work on the mule’s flanks, and it had grown cold as all get-out. He sipped at his coffee, holding it under his face to let the steam warm the frozen rawhide of his cheeks and nose, sensing the painful return of feeling to his fingertips as he clutched the tin cup in both hands.

  Finally he asked those close by, “How you fellers get yourselves in such a fine fix as this?”

  Around that fire Shad Sweete and some others began to relate the story of how forty of Bridger’s brigade had run into a small band of Blackfoot, some twenty of them sniffing around in Crow country, a few weeks back. Those forty trappers had rushed off to ambush the war party, pinning them down on a narrow, timbered island in the middle of the Yellowstone, then nearly wiped them out.

  “But something tells me a few of them niggers got away,” Scratch declared, “and they rode hard for home to bring the rest of these devil’s whelps.”

  Squire Ebbert nodded. “They left the dead ones behind—four bastards the rest shoved under the ice covering the river. But from all the patches of blood on the snow and the scratches of them travois they made when they hauled off their wounded, easy to tell we cut ’em up purty bad.”

  “I’ll say we cut ’em up real bad,” Shad snorted. “Next day when we had us a look where they forted up, we found plenty of brains and blood.”

  “That war party didn’t have a horse left between ’em after we run off their stock,” Meek explained by the fire. “So they was dragging them travois outta there on foot.”

  “Way we tallied it,” Sweete reckoned, “there wasn’t but a handful got outta there ’thout a scratch.”

  “Don’t look like it matters now,” Bass grumped. “If’n only one got away to bring the others, you’re still in the soup, boys.”

  “Look who’s in the soup with us!” Ebbert bawled, slapping his knee.

  “I’m glad he is,” Sweete observed.

  After sipping some more of his steamy coffee before it went cold with the rapid drop in temperature, Scratch asked, “So how long you fellas been hunkered down here?”

  “Three days now,” Meek disclosed. “Ever since we run off them Blackfoot, Gabe’s been like a nervous ol’ woman: ever’ day he’d go up on that bluff yonder with his spyglass. Looked over the country far and wide.”

  “Only a matter of time afore they come to even the score,” Sweete groaned.

  Early that next morning on his climb to the bluff, Bridger discovered the plain downriver boiling with Blackfoot, with even more warriors streaming across the ridges. Hurrying back to camp, he started his men building the breastworks of deadfall and buckbrush, laboring long and hard to hack clear a wide no-man’s-land completely around their fortress. Inside, the trappers chopped down nearly every cottonwood for the walls.

  Then yesterday Bridger had slipped out to learn what he could of the Blackfoot, discovering that even more of the enemy were arriving, seeing that the warriors had moved their camp no more than two miles from where the white men waited out the brutal, subzero cold.

  By that thi
rd day the sixty-man brigade had a bulwark that stood almost six feet high, enclosing a square some two hundred fifty feet to a side. If they were going to die there, they sure as hell planned on making it tough on the Blackfoot to rub them out.

  “Goddamn ’em and their war songs,” Sweete grumbled beside Scratch now. “They been playing them drums ever’ day they had us surrounded.”

  While the intense cold settled into his every joint this evening of his second day within the breastworks, Titus had to admit those never-ending drums were starting to bother him too as the trappers sat in the fading glow of that winter twilight. Listening to the distant singing, shouts, and high-pitched shrieks, Bass chuckled and said, “You’re ’bout as grumpy as a bear ’thout your sleep, ain’cha?”

  “Cain’t none of us sleep much since they showed up,” Bridger explained as he came up at a crouch. “Shad’s got good reason to be grumpy—he’s allays been the one made sure we always had half the boys awake while the rest got some shut-eye.”

  Night fell on the Yellowstone valley, a second coming of darkness for Bass here among Bridger’s sixty. Men came and went around the fires burning at the bottom of pits scooped out of the sandy soil so none of them would be backlit as they moved about their fortress. More than two dozen of the men had already curled up in their robes near one or another of the ten fires, desperately trying for some sleep because they were scheduled to go on watch later that night.

  Bass lay there in a cocoon of his own robes and blanket, shuddering until the fur finally warmed with his body’s heat. For the longest time he could not get comfortable enough to sleep, listening to the low voices of those keeping a watch at the walls, the snuffling of the cold animals gnawing on scraps of peeled cottonwood bark nearby, the crunch and whine of footsteps made upon the trampled snow. And through it all he thought of Waits-by-the-Water, how she was faring with Magpie and her newborn brother.

  He wondered when the First Maker would show him a name for the child, then brooded that he might never make it back to the Crow village to give that name to the boy.

  There wasn’t a man among those sixty-two of them who didn’t know the deck was stacked against them. At his last count Bridger announced there had to be more than a thousand Blackfoot ready to charge the breastworks. Chances were the warriors had worked themselves up with the singing and dancing and drum pounding for better than three days so they’d attack in the morning—the fourth. Plenty of horses and guns, powder and blankets to win as the spoils of battle when they wiped out the white men.

  He thought about how grim the mood had become just that afternoon as the sun sank in the west and the trappers saw just how clear that terrible night would be, driving the temperatures far below zero. It grew so cold the water in the trees froze, and they began to pop. From time to time through the night a big cottonwood split as the cold continued to plummet—booming like that throaty twelve-pounder at Fort Union when it had raked through the cabins where the Deschamps clan took cover. Smaller trees popped like the smoothbores these Blackfoot traded off the English north in Canada.

  How he wished he were back beside his woman. Smelling her skin, feeling himself grow hard and hot against her flesh. How he missed her. How he would miss her if this were the end.

  Scratch knew he had to stay there among friends who were glad to have one more man, one more gun. If these men were going to hunker down to the bitter end, taking as many of the bastards as they could with then) when the end came … then Bass decided he belonged there.

  After all, there was no better place for a man to reach the end of his string than among his fellows. No better time to have his candle snuffed out than in giving his life while protecting his friends—

  “Bass!” the voice whispered sharply in his ear.

  Instantly coming out of the thick fog of sleep, blinking his eyes, ripping back the buffalo robe, and poking his face into the cold blackness, he found Osborne Russell kneeling over him.

  “Bridger sent me for you.”

  His mouth was as pasty as the scum of bear tallow at the bottom of a week-old kettle. “Yeah,” he groaned. “Bridger—”

  Suddenly Titus realized something was different.

  The whole damned fortress was bathed in an eerie crimson light. The pale-red glow shimmered and pulsed, turning Russell’s face, his squat beaver hat, the upturned collar of his buffalo coat … everything tinged red as fresh blood.

  Titus was scared right down to his marrow. But it wasn’t the cold that made him shiver as he kicked off the robes and blanket to stand.

  “W-where’s he?” His teeth chattered, clacking more from fright than cold. Scratch admitted he hadn’t been this scared since Asa McAfferty had first chattered about hoodoos and malevolent spirits slipping through that crack in the sky from the other side of existence.

  “C’mon,” Russell said as he snugged his hat down over his ears.

  There wasn’t a man asleep now. Every one of the sixty-one either stood watching the sky, or sat dumbfounded in his robes, having been awakened by the others.

  “How long this been going on?” Titus asked with a gulp.

  Meek turned at his approach. “Just started.”

  “Damn, it’s almost purty,” Scratch whispered quietly. “If’n it didn’t scare the piss outta me.”

  Then he realized he did need to relieve himself and turned away to the breastworks. He urinated on the brush, not once taking his eyes off the dancing, shimmering lights that slowly extended their crimson paint across more and more of the northern sky.

  “Ever you see something like this?” Sweete asked as Bass stepped up beside him.

  He wagged his head.

  “Neither’ve I,” Bridger agreed.

  “Damn! Lookee there!” Levin Mitchell exclaimed nearby.

  At the very center of the corona the lights no longer merely pulsed. Now to the east of north, bands of crimson lights began to stream skyward from the edge of the earth—brilliant fingers of red, rust, orange, and blood-tinted gold. Every streamer of color wavering, pulsing, expanding, and diminishing, then expanding again as the trappers murmured among themselves.

  “Listen,” Bass said after a long time of watching the heavens.

  “To what?” Meek asked.

  “I don’t hear a thing,” Russell commented.

  “That’s just it,” Titus told them. “I ain’t heard them goddamned drums since you come woke me.”

  “I believe Scratch is right,” Bridger declared. “Sons of bitches ain’t pounding and dancing no more.”

  “They see’d this sky too.”

  “Bound to, Scratch,” Shad said. “Lookee there—them red lights are brightest over in their part of the sky, off to the east yonder.”

  For a long time Titus brooded on the heavenly show, then said, “This here gotta be some big medicine to them Blackfoot, fellas. The way Injuns read sign—this bound to be ’bout the biggest medicine any of them niggers ever laid eyes on.”

  In all his natural-born days, this eerie display of the northern lights had to be the most frightening exhibition of celestial fire he had ever witnessed. Up to this moment the most dramatic night phenomenon he had seen had been back in the autumn of thirty-three, when the sky rained fire. One shooting star after another, a handful at a time, almost from the moment the sky grew dark enough to spot the starry trails right on till dawn when the coming light made the sky grow so pale the meteor shower was no longer visible.

  Remembering how Josiah’s little boy had cried with wonder and fear that night … Joshua.

  Bass wondered on him now. The child would be … close to four years old. Walking and talking, likely riding a horse too. How he hoped Josiah had fared well down there in Taos with Matthew Kinkead and that free man, Esau.

  Safer there were they all than he up here in Crow country where the damned Blackfoot had come to raid.

  He whispered a curse on that thousand surrounding Bridger’s brigade, a breathless curse on their women and children, on the
ir old and on their young who would grow into warriors, an especially hearty curse on their women—for it was they who gave birth to generations of fighting men.

  “What did you say?” Sweete asked, stepping over.

  He immediately realized he had been muttering in a whisper. “Just asking God to do something for me is all.”

  “Never knowed you to be a religious man,” Shad replied.

  “I ain’t, not like most.”

  “You was asking God to do what?” Bridger inquired.

  Scratch sighed. “I asked the same God what made that bloody sky up there to wipe out all them red niggers.”

  “You a praying man, Titus Bass?” Meek asked when he stepped close.

  Titus thought a moment, then said, “I s’pose I am when it comes down to it, Joe. Leastways—like I said—I’m praying God rubs all them sonsabitches off the face of the earth.”

  “I figger ary man can pray for that too,” Bridger added quietly.

  And quiet was just the way it remained inside those breastworks for the rest of the night. So quiet, a man could swear he could hear the hum of that northern sky as it pulsated and wavered red as blood. From downstream floated the distant songs and chants, the hearty rhythms as some of the Blackfoot pounded sticks on rawhide parfleches serving in place of drums. They too had to be watching the portent of this terrible sky.

  Gradually the east began to lighten, and with the coming of dawn the brilliance of the northern lights softened from crimson to a pale rose. Eventually there were no more streaks of red in the sky as the sun made its appearance downriver. And with that newborn light Titus saw how the frightening cold had settled along the Yellowstone itself, seeping among the trees, its foggy mist clinging in dirty-white smears through the bonelike cottonwood and brush.

  “Here they come!”

  At the warning cry the sixty-two were instantly jerked into motion, crowding toward that wall of the breastworks where the call had been raised. No longer were these fur men quiet. First they muttered to themselves, then talked low to others nearby.