Ride the Moon Down

by Terry C. Johnston

  “They’ll slip off now, won’t they?” someone asked in that still summer darkness.

  “Not if we fire at that goddamned island from time to time,” Meek suggested, his voice uncannily flat and even.

  “Joe’s right,” Sweete agreed. “Teach ’em not to budge. Keep their heads down.”

  On into the night the half-a-hundred white men lay along the west bank of Horse Creek, taking their turns firing at the island where the Bannock had forted up, continuing to dig their foxholes. And all through that night the women wailed quietly, men sang war songs softly, and children whimpered. Bass felt sad for the children—they didn’t know no better.

  But them big folks, men and women both—they were bad two ways of Sunday, and they deserved to die—stealing horses from the Nez Perce, a people what had been good to the white man since the first explorers with the Corps of Discovery crossed these mountains. And now they’d gone and killed a white man’s wife … an innocent woman who meant them Bannock no harm.

  For that, this whole damned shitteree of brownskins was due a lesson.

  Every minute or so one of the trappers fired his rifle at the island, keeping the enemy on the move, terrifying them as the short summer night dragged on. There would be no escape from their burrows on that sandbar.

  Those first streaks of dawn fingered out of the east, and with them came a few arrows arcing out of the willows.

  Then late that morning Bass grew concerned and slid over to Carson, telling him he would return after he rode back to camp. “My woman’s gonna be fretting. Likely she’s heard the shooting and gone looking for me.”

  “Take your time,” Kit said. “We both got wives, so I know how they can worry a man.”

  Waits-by-the-Water loped barefoot onto the sunny prairie toward Bass the moment she spotted him in the distance. She was crying by the time he lunged the horse to a halt and vaulted out of the saddle. Clumsily she hurried into his arms, Flea on her hip, Magpie wrapping her arms around her father’s leg.

  Tears streamed down the woman’s cheeks as she mumbled words he didn’t understand; then suddenly she went silent, pulling back from him, hands brushing across his bloody shirt.

  “It’s Zeke,” he confessed immediately, turning to point at the prairie. The dog was in the distance, gamely coming along the best he could on those three good legs.

  “The dog, he is wounded?”

  After explaining how Zeke was hit with the arrow, Waits cried all over again as the dog came up. Magpie leaped on him, locking her arms around his thick neck, smothering him with her tiny kisses.

  Waits pressed her cheek against Bass’s neck. “We worried about you—”

  “I come to tell you I’m fine,” he said. “But it isn’t over.”

  While he wolfed down some of the meat she had cooked last night while waiting for him, washing it down with cool creek water, Scratch told her of the siege—its cause, the death of Meek’s Mountain Lamb. Then declared that he would be going back. And he made sure she knew why.

  “I’d ’spect any friend to do the same for me if’n it were you to die,” he said quietly. “Any man what’s got him a woman. Any man what’s ever lost him his woman. I’m going back to do my best by Joe Meek.”

  After tying Zeke to a tree with a length of rawhide lariat, Bass filled up three more horns of powder and snatched up another two pouches of balls from his possibles. First he bent to kiss wide-eyed Flea on the forehead, then knelt to sweep Magpie into his arms, holding her aloft as he kissed both her cheeks.

  Setting her back on the prairie, Scratch handed his rifle to the little girl who stood only half as tall as the tall weapon. He turned to embrace his wife. Pulling back from her, he said, “Close your eyes.”

  When she did, Bass kissed each eyelid gently.

  She opened them and he said, “That’s until those eyes see me coming back to you.”

  He turned, took up the rifle, and leaped into the saddle again. Bass heard Zeke howling as he galloped away, the hot moisture streaming down his cheeks. And he thought he heard Waits crying far behind him where he had left her.

  A sound that made the guard hairs stand at the back of his neck.

  21

  They ended up pinning the Bannock down on that island for another two days and nights. Through those hours of darkness when they could not see their enemies, the trappers smoked their pipes and talked about their chances of wiping out that band of lying thieves.

  “Why they ain’t getting hungry?” George Ebbert growled with dismay. “We had ’em trapped in there for better’n three days!”

  “They’re killing their ponies,” Bass explained matter-of-factly.

  Shad Sweete agreed. “They got enough horses in there to last ’em a long, long time.”

  “Water ain’t no problem neither,” Joe Meek observed resentfully. “Bastards can hole up in there just as long as we can hold out up here.”

  “I always knowed the Bannawks was about the stealingest red niggers,” Scratch observed, “but I never knowed ’em to be near so stupid that they’d sashay right on into a white man’s camp just as bold as you could be and try to steal some horses!”

  “Only way to write a treaty with their kind is in blood,” Jim Bridger grumbled.

  “That’s right,” Osborne Russell declared, patting his half-stock percussion rifle. “Best way to write a treaty with them Bannock is with this here rifle. It’s the only pen what will write a treaty the bastards will keep.”

  Sometime after the moon had set that third night and men were snoring around him, Bass sat in the brush remembering a summer night long ago when he had remained behind with Josiah and a few others who were maintaining their vigil around those Blackfoot they had surrounded in Pierre’s Hole. But unlike that band of thieves and murderers, these Bannock hadn’t all slipped away the first night.

  “Scratch!” came the sharp whisper from that chunk of shadow crawling his way out of the gloom.

  “Who’s that?”

  Sweete’s big grin took form in the starshine. “Something I wanted to tell you ever since this little fight got rolling—but Joe’s always been close by.”

  “He sleeping?”

  Sweete nodded and settled in beside Titus with a sigh as one of the trappers fired a shot at the island. “Think it’s the first time he’s shut his eyes in the last three nights.”

  “That man’s taking this real hard,” Scratch commented in a whisper. “Can’t blame him none.”

  “That’s why I figgered I wouldn’t tell you the story ’bout Joe and his Mountain Lamb till he wasn’t around,” Shad declared.

  “She was the woman these Bannock killed?”

  “Yep. And late last winter he killed a Crow nigger on count of her too.”

  “Crow?”

  “Thought you might’n heard tell of it—what with you being up there, married to a Crow gal and all.”

  Titus shrugged. “Didn’t hear a peep of it. There’s two bands of them Crow. Since I didn’t hear tell of the trouble, I figger it was Long Hair’s bunch.”

  “Yep—one of Long Hair’s band. Happened up the Bighorn a ways. Some time after you turned off from us, we run onto their village. They had that trader from Fort Van Buren with ’em—”

  “Tullock?”

  “That’s him. He’d come out from the Tongue and hooked up with ’em late that winter. Was doing some trading,” Sweete explained. “But that big war party what come along with Tullock to visit us weren’t good Crow.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Sonsabitches brung the devil right into our camp. While Tullock had his blankets out and most of them young bucks was trading with him or with Bridger, one of ’em takes a shine to Mountain Lamb of a sudden.”

  “That’s bad,” Scratch clucked softly. “Don’t ever wanna get wrong-ways with Joe Meek.”

  “That crazy buck walked over to Mountain Lamb’s shelter, strutting his best to get her attention,” Sweete declared. “When she wouldn’t look up from the
moccasins she was sewing up for Joe, that Crow bastard took to walking back and forth in front of her—sure he’d get her to look at just how purty he was.”

  “So Joe got jealous when she looked at that Crow buck?”

  “No,” and Sweete wagged his head. “Mountain Lamb never did give that son of a bitch a look-see. Fact was, Joe was sitting right inside their shelter, watching it all—and getting a real tickle from it too, what with the way that bastard kept trying harder and harder to get Mountain Lamb’s eye.”

  “So what caused the trouble?”

  “When the gal kept on refusing to look up at that buck, it burned his powder so bad that he walked back on over to her and slapped her ’cross the face with his rawhide quirt.”

  “Damn!” Bass moaned. “Sure as rain, that red nigger picked the wrong woman to play Injun with.”

  “Yep—Joe pulled up his fifty-eight and shot the bastard where he stood right over Mountain Lamb holding that quirt in his hand,” Shad said. “I don’t figger he ever knowed what hit him at that range.”

  “But I reckon all hell broke loose then.”

  With a wag of his head Sweete said, “The wolf was let out to howl—right there in our camp. By the time Bridger and Tullock got the shooting stopped, we had one man dead, and there was two more Crow rubbed out. The trader finally got them red niggers out of our camp when Gabe passed out a bunch of presents to pay for them dead Injuns.”

  “When it was a goddamned Crow buck what started it?”

  “That were their country, Scratch,” Shad replied. “We was on the Bighorn, right in the heart of Crow country.”

  “Ain’t never a call for bad manners,” Scratch said softly. “No matter they be a cocky Crow or not.”

  “Time was a white feller could count on folks in that tribe,” Sweete said, regret heavy in his voice. “Past winter or two, I ain’t so sure no more.”

  “Time was we all counted on the beaver staying seal fat and sleek,” Titus whispered with some of that same regret. “We counted on the price of plews staying high. But the years has changed things, Shad. The years gone and changed us too.”

  For the most part they sat in silence the rest of that night, taking turns curling up to catch some sleep while the other kept watch. All along that riverbank some slept while the rest stared at the island, a few even firing an occasional shot at the brushy sandbar just to let the Bannock know the white man hadn’t cashed in his chips and pulled out.

  Bass shivered slightly in the gray light of dawn-coming and rubbed both of his gritty eyes. How he wished for some coffee, some whiskey, something that would cut the awful taste in his mouth. He hacked up some of the night-gather clogging his throat and turned toward the island to spit into the willow. That’s when he spotted the movement.

  “Shad!” he said sharply. “Shad!”

  Others had seen it too as Sweete came awake, rolling onto his hands and knees, blinking his bleary eyes.

  “Lookee there,” Bass instructed.

  Up and down the riverbank in the dim light other trappers were peering closely at the sandbar, trying their best to make out what the shift in shadows and the rustle of willow meant. A mourning cry grew louder and louder. That wailing was like a gritty mouthful of cold sand lying in his belly—something he knew he was bound to bring up sooner or later.

  A rustle came from the brush near his end of the island, and an old woman parted the bushes to step into the open as dawn’s light swelled around them that summer morning. The front of her dress smeared with blood, the ancient one clutched a long pipe in both frail hands. Raising it to the river bank above her where the white men huddled in the brush holding siege on her people, the old woman called out in a reedy voice.

  “What she saying?” a man yelled.

  “That’s Snake,” Scratch answered. “I catch some of it.”

  “But she ain’t a Snake,” Ebbert grunted.

  “I s’pose she Aggers some of us’ll know some Snake,” Bass said.

  “All of you!” Meek hollered. “Keep quiet so us what knows Snake can figger out what that ol’ woman’s saying!”

  “You heard him!” Bridger ordered. “Hush!”

  Moments later Joe explained, “She’s telling us we’ve killed all their warriors. But the bullets keep killing.”

  “We ain’t killed all their men!” Rube Herring snorted. “Some of ’em must’ve run off!”

  Waiting a moment while she repeated the next part to be certain what she said, Meek continued. “Now she’s asking if we wanna kill the women too.”

  “Maybe we oughtta kill ’em all,” Robert Newell suggested.

  But his best friend, Joe Meek, grabbed Newell’s arm and snarled, “Don’t you see? That’d make us no better’n them nigger dogs to kill a woman the way they done!”

  “Hold on, Joe!” Bass ordered. “Listen: the ol’ woman’s saying if we wanna smoke with women to make peace, she has a pipe and some tobaccy too.”

  Meek stood, disappointment graying his face. “If’n there ain’t a man left in there—I s’pose I done all I come to do, boys. Time for this child to mosey on back to camp.”

  Up and down that west bank close to a hundred trappers slowly emerged from the brush, starting for their horses they had tied here and there within the deserted Bannock camp they had plundered during the days of siege.

  Scratch walked over and grabbed hold of Meek’s elbow. “I figger it’s time to think ’bout putting your woman to rest, Joe. You need any help—count on me.”

  Not uttering another word, Meek laid a hand on Scratch’s shoulder for a moment, then turned away, climbed atop his horse, and rode off alone.

  “Every man finds his own way to heal a broke heart,” Scratch declared several days later when he overheard a few men at the trader’s tent talking about the way Meek had chosen to mourn the loss of Umentucken, his Mountain Lamb. “Ain’t for me to say he shouldn’t climb right back in the saddle again. Ain’t for none of us to say he ain’t grieving in his own way.”

  Just that morning, only one day after Tom Fitzpatrick brought in the caravan that had embarked for rendezvous from Westport, Joe had loaded up a horse with finery and ridden right over to the Nez Perce camp where he had taken a shine to a pretty young woman. Not long after her father had approved of the marriage, Meek was back in the company camp with his new wife, celebrating his good fortune that he wouldn’t remain lonely for long at all.

  After weeks of horse racing, gambling at cards or a game of hand, not to mention endless hours of yarning while they waited beneath the shady trees for the long-overdue trader, it damn near brought tears to Bass’s eyes to see how small Fitzpatrick’s pack train was as it descended off the bluffs and made its way down to the junction of Horse Creek and the Green. No more than twenty small two-wheeled carts pulled by mules, tended by some forty-five men trudging along on both sides of the procession.

  “Poor doin’s,” Titus muttered as Fitzpatrick escorted Sir William Drummond Stewart west for another rendezvous. “Poor damned digger doin’s.”

  Maybe the trade would hold for another year or so. If only long enough that the fur business could get itself straightened out back east and folks found out that those new silk hats couldn’t hold a candle to prime beaver felt. Beaver was bound to rise. All the old hivernants were saying it. Sure as hell, beaver was bound to rise.

  Just like the goddamned prices the company was charging for what little they sent west with Fitzpatrick.

  “Two dollar a pint for sugar!” Scratch roared at the red-faced clerk. “How much your coffee?”

  “Same—two dollars.”

  “Damn,” he grumbled in disgust.

  Blankets were going for twenty dollars while a common cotton shirt cost a man five. Tobacco was damned pricey at two dollars a pound, but the toll on whiskey hadn’t gone up over the last few summers: holding at four dollars the pint. He figured those parley-voo traders were pretty savvy about that: hold down the cost of liquor and most men simply wouldn’t m
ind all that much if the price of everything else climbed sky-high.

  What kept Scratch from throwing up his hands at those mountain-high prices and refusing to trade for anything at all was the fact that the company offered five dollars a pound for prime pelts, four dollars for poorer plews. That meant his Musselshell beaver brought him top dollar at the trading tent that afternoon when he brought his family along to look over the beads and rings, ribbon and hawksbells.

  While Waits-by-the-Water picked through the merchandise to find herself a new brass kettle, Scratch stood at the other end of the long counter with Magpie as the girl chose several hanks of new ribbon to wrap up her brown braids, along with a new handkerchief of black silk to tie around her head the way her father tied a faded blue bandanna around his.

  Then she spotted the tray of shiny, multicolored beads.

  “Popo! Look!”

  With the way she gushed and stuck out her hands to touch the beads in each compartment, Bass knew he was already in trouble.

  “Purty, ain’t they?” he asked.

  She gazed up at him a moment, imitating the word, “Pur-r-r-ty.”

  “That’s right. I s’pose you want some too.”

  “Yes,” and she nodded emphatically. But when she dug her fingers in and pulled out a handful of the deep cobalt-blue beads, along with some of the oxblood variety with their narrow white centers, Magpie surprised him by saying in Crow, “For you, popo—these so pretty on your ears.”

  “On my ears?” he repeated, confused a moment.

  Reaching up to tug on the tail of his shirt, Magpie pulled him down far enough that she tapped the small hoops of brass wire he wore through both earlobes. “Beads hang there.”

  He straightened, smiling. “Damn fine idee, little’un. Put some purties on my hangy-downs.”