Ride the Moon Down

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Camp guards,” she announced, pointing to their right.

  He turned in the saddle, finding the eight horsemen bursting from the timber, loping their way.

  More hooves clattered to their left as another half dozen broke into the open. These, like the first, carried shields at their left elbows, war clubs or bows in their right hands, while a few held aloft long lances festooned with scalps and brightly colored cloth streamers made all the more brilliant in these moments of the sun’s brief journey between earth and cloud bank.

  At first he did not recognize any of the young men coming their way, afraid this was not a Crow village. But as the riders approached, he recognized the hairstyles, the special markings on a shield here or there. And then he heard a camp guard yelling at them in his wife’s tongue.

  These were Crow!

  But instead of welcoming, the voices shouted in warning, two of them now—both voices strident and … afraid.

  “What are they telling us?” he asked of her, beginning to pull back on the pony’s reins uneasily.

  “We must stop,” she said in dismay, her eyes as wide as Mexican conchos when she looked to him for explanation.

  Of a sudden Titus was afraid he knew the answer. Fourteen warriors fanned out in a broad front as they came to a halt fifty yards from them.

  “Popo?”

  “Ssshhh,” he rasped at Magpie.

  He felt the girl pull herself against his back more tightly as she tilted her face up so she could whisper to him.

  “Why is my mother so afraid?”

  Scratch looked at Waits-by-the-Water and had to admit she did look frightened.

  “I think she is excited about—”

  “Do not come any closer!” interrupted the warrior beneath the swelling wreath of frosty breath that encircled his head.

  “But we are friends,” Bass hollered in reply, watching one of the guards rein about and kick his pony into a lope, heading back to the village.

  “I know you, Waits-by-the-Water,” the first warrior admitted. “When my younger sister was a little girl, you and she played together with your tiny lodges and horses and dolls. But you cannot—”

  “Three Iron?” she suddenly asked. “Is that you?”

  “Yes—”

  “Then you know us!” Waits interrupted. “Why don’t you invite us into the camp? I have waited a long time to see my mother again, to show her how much her grandson has grown.”

  “I can’t invite you into the village,” he shouted.

  “But—you are my people!” she cried.

  “Your husband is not,” Three Iron explained.

  Far behind the camp guards Bass saw two riders emerge from the village, coming their way at a gallop. He turned to look quickly at the dismay on her face, realizing he must try to talk some sense into these warriors.

  “You say you know me,” Titus began, hearing Magpie start to whimper quietly against his back. “Your people have always welcomed me—even when I came on foot chasing horse thieves.”

  “I am Red Leggings,” shouted one of the guards near the end of the crescent. “I was with Pretty On Top the day we rode off with your animals many winters ago.”

  “Then you must explain why you will not allow me to bring my wife and children into your camp to see their relations.”

  Halting, one of the arriving horsemen announced, “It would be dangerous.”

  “Strikes-in-Camp?” she wailed. “Is that you, my brother?”

  “Yes, sister. I am here.”

  She nudged her pony forward, saying, “How I longed to see you and my mother—”

  At that instant Scratch lunged over and grabbed the pony’s halter, pulling to a stop.

  “Stay there, sister!” Strikes-in-Camp demanded. “You can come no closer.”

  “Brother!” she shrieked, covering her face with a hand.

  Magpie began to wail behind him.

  “Why won’t you accept your sister into the camp of her people?” Titus asked in a strong voice, words hanging brittle as ice while the clouds lowered over them. The sun was disappearing, rising into the blue-black, as if all the warmth of that crimson light was being snuffed out. Tiny lances of ice darted about their faces, stinging the cold flesh.

  Strikes-in-Camp explained. “She might be sick.”

  “S-sick?” Waits sobbed. “Only my heart is sick to be treated so badly by my people—”

  Afraid he already knew, the trapper asked, “How do you think your sister is sick?”

  “She is with a white man,” yelled another man.

  “How will that make her sick, Strikes-in-Camp?”

  “In that hottest part of the summer, we heard the stories of the white man sickness killing other tribes,” his brother-in-law explained, his pony pawing a hoof at the frozen, snowy ground.

  Pausing as he thought, Bass suddenly said, “But you can see I am not sick—”

  “We have heard the white man does not grow sick and die with this terrible affliction,” another warrior interrupted. “Only the Indians. Mandans, Arikara, Assiniboine, even Blackfoot too. Now that you have come, white man—this evil has followed us here.”

  “You ran away from your fear of it, didn’t you?” Titus asked.

  “The old men believed it the wisest,” the young warrior declared. “The oldest among them remembered the tribal stories of another time long, long ago when our people lived close to the great muddy river—a time when this same evil sickness of the seeping wounds and fever swept through the villages along the river.”

  “The Crow have known about this sickness before?”

  “Yes,” the young warrior said. “Our old men say only a few died because our people quickly scattered onto the prairie, running faster than the invisible terror that had come to kill us all.”

  Bass nodded. “So your chiefs decided you should run again.”

  “And stay as far away as we can from the white man who once more brings this evil to kill Indians who are his enemies,” Strikes-in-Camp said. “Even Indians who are his friends.”

  “Look at me. I am not sick.”

  “You are a white man. You carry the sickness in you,” he said, waving his arm in frustration. “While it doesn’t consume you, it will kill us.”

  Stretching out his arm to indicate his wife, Bass said, “Look at your sister! She is alive! We have been to Tullock’s post and she did not die. Our children are still alive. There is no disease in them!”

  Clearly frustrated now, Strikes-in-Camp roared, “You must stay away!”

  “B-brother!” she keened, her voice rising even as the black belly of the clouds tore open with the first falling of an icy snow.

  “If I take my wife into your camp to see her mother, what will happen to me?”

  The warrior said, “I will have to kill you.”

  Bass swallowed hard. “And if my wife comes to see her mother without me?”

  Drawing himself up, Strikes-in-Camp said, “I will have to kill her.”

  “We are not your enemies,” Bass snarled, feeling angry at his helplessness.

  “The white man brought this sickness to the mountains. You must stay away from us.”

  Scratch reached over and took his wife’s forearm in his mitten, gripping it reassuringly. “Tell your mother … say we send her our love and want to see her face one day soon.”

  “Perhaps one day,” Strikes-in-Camp said sadly.

  Waits began to cry, covering her face with a blanket mitten as she wheeled her pony around and started on their backtrail.

  “Strikes-in-Camp,” Titus called. “You must be careful.”

  “Of other white men like you?”

  “No,” he replied. “I bring a warning that the Crow must be careful of the Blackfoot.”

  “Not the white man?”

  “No,” Bass said. “The Blackfoot carry this terrible sickness now.”

  24

  A wolf called that gray morning as the icy snow fell softer, then beat no more
against the side of the brush-and-canvas shelter where he lay with her and the children.

  Winter was old, almost done. Yet it hung on and on, refusing to give itself to spring.

  For weeks now Waits-by-the-Water had hardly spoken a word. She still sang to Flea to put him to sleep at night, and she held Magpie in her arms too. She even made love to him with the same ferocity she always had … but she did not talk much at all.

  Never, never about Yellow Belly’s camp. Not one word about her people.

  Better to let that wound be, he decided, hoping it would heal on its own.

  That wolf howled again, perhaps a different one. It was a plaintive call, anguished and lonely.

  If it had been raining—instead of snowing—Titus might be more concerned, even afraid. A wolf that came out to howl in the rain was the spirit of a warrior killed before his time. So if it were raining instead of that weepy snow, it might well make him venture from these warm robes and blankets, push into the cold timber in search of that restless, disembodied spirit.

  Up there in Blackfoot country was damn well going to be plenty of wolves to howl in the rain come spring. Maybe the cold of winter had killed all the pox. Nothing like that was going to live through the long, deep cold of this northern land. If the Blackfoot weren’t all dead from the disease, then at least the pox was finished now. And what was left of the tribe was nothing more than a pale shadow of what they had been.

  Ghosts.

  Mandan, Arikara, Assiniboine, and Blackfoot. And now the Crow.

  Yellow Belly’s people might as well have been ghosts too. Day after day, week upon week, he and Waits-by-the-Water never could get very close to the village before camp guards rode up shouting, threatening, until she explained that she only wanted one of the warriors to bring her mother to the edge of camp. Just to see Crane’s face in the distance, to know she was still alive. To show her mother they were still alive and well. So Crane could see they were not being eaten by a terrible sickness.

  The children waved to Crane across that distance, and their grandmother waved back—then suddenly turned, slump-shouldered, and hurried back into the village with her daughter-in-law’s arm around her shoulder. That retreat always made Waits-by-the-Water even sadder.

  Something on the order of a week later Bass had finally convinced her they had no business keeping a vigil around the fringes of that camp of frightened people.

  Ghosts, he thought. His wife’s family might as well be ghosts.

  That last time Crane brought the rest of them with her, all of Strikes-in-Camp’s family. Bright Wings and the children waved before they turned to go. Then, before she retreated into the village, Crane pointed to an outcropping of rocks several hundred yards from the village. She gestured expansively, struggling to make herself understood.

  Then Waits began to cry and held up little Flea to wave to his grandmother. Titus helped Magpie stand tall upon his shoulders as she signaled to that small, distant person. In the end the girl even blew kisses to her grandmother the way Titus taught her to do. Waits turned away with Flea, and they returned to their camp where his wife sobbed until close to sundown.

  When they remembered the point of rocks. Hurrying there, Waits discovered a newly smoked antelope skin wrapped inside a piece of oiled rawhide. Within it rested several small gifts Crane had bundled together: a tiny deer-hair-stuffed doll for Magpie and a stuffed horse for Flea, two small whistles carved from cedar, while beneath them all lay a badger-claw necklace.

  Her breath caught in her throat when she saw the necklace, pulled it slowly from the antelope skin.

  “This belonged to my fa—” But she quickly remembered. “He-Who-Is-No-Longer-With-Us,” Waits explained, holding the claws and beads reverently across the palms of both hands.

  “It is a very great thing for your mother to want you to have this,” Bass said. “Did he carve these whistles?”

  “I think he must have,” she replied quietly, rubbing their red wood with a fingertip. “That was his name. I remember how our people knew of him because he could blow on a whistle he made with his own hands—blowing a sound just like the bull elk calling from the mountainside in the autumn.”

  “Waits-by-the-Water,” he sighed, “your mother wanted you to have something of him to show our children.”

  “Yes,” she sobbed, “a totem to show Magpie and Flea when we tell them about their grandfather.”

  She put it on, and he realized she meant never to take it off. Right from the moment she dropped the necklace over her head, Scratch knew that somehow it made her feel closer not just to her father who no longer lived, but to her mother. Closer to her people.

  But he never uttered a word about his deepest fear, more a regret. Titus never mentioned how afraid he was that in leaving those gifts for her daughter and grandchildren, Crane was saying that she realized she might never see those loved ones again. Then time and again he argued with himself, thinking the old woman hadn’t really been trying to say good-bye, believing they would never meet again.

  So each day he wondered how long the Crow would keep them apart, and he worried if Yellow Belly’s band ever would allow Waits-by-the-Water back among her people, back in the arms of her family. For weeks now as winter softened its fury, they had remained no more than a day’s journey from the village. When it migrated to a new campsite—requiring more wood and water, more grass for their herds—Bass packed up his family and followed, never drawing close enough to cause the camp guards alarm, never working streams so close that the Crow village might spoil his trapping haunts.

  Camping no more than a day’s ride from her people … just in case they might have a change of heart.

  Every few days as he tended to his trapline, Scratch went to some high ground to scour the country for sign of the camp, the lodge smoke, any horsemen out for game until the Crow had run all the game out of the area. Sometimes the hunters, or those scouts who constantly patrolled the hills and ridges for sign of their enemies, would run across the lone white man at work in the icy streams, or on his way back to his camp with his beaver pelts. Never did those hunters come anywhere close enough that he could make sign, much less call out to them. Instead, they always stopped upon recognizing the trapper, turned about, and rode off.

  Over and over he reminded himself that he couldn’t blame them. As cruel as it must feel to his woman, Scratch told himself he didn’t have the right to blame her people for their fear of him—and what poison they believed he represented.

  After all they had somehow heard about the horrors of the pox, both those tribal legends of long ago and the fresh tales of summer’s terror on the upper Missouri, the Crow had reason to be cautious. Worse still, this new calamity fed the superstitious fear of those among the Crow who proclaimed there was now every excuse to drive the white men out of Absaroka. More and more of the Crow were ready to believe the leaders who spoke against the trappers and traders.

  Where he once was welcomed, now he was feared, shunned, even hated. Perhaps Waits-by-the-Water did not truly know what hate was because she had never before experienced the hatred of others. Bass doubted she herself had ever hated anyone before. But he knew full well the power of hate. He understood how hate goaded a man into acts of revenge against those he despised, or acts of retribution against those who despised him.

  Titus hoped she remained innocent, hoped she never knew either side of hate.

  Sadness rode with them that winter—which meant that its handmaiden, called bitterness, could not be far behind.

  That morning she didn’t say much in either tongue as the wolf awoke him before dawn. Titus pulled on his clothing, then quietly told her he would not return before sundown. He kissed her, feeling something in Waits-by-the-Water’s embrace of her longing to explain how bewildered she was. Instead of speaking, however, she only held him tight, kissed his mouth, then released him to the darkness.

  As the black became gray, Bass dismounted, tied the horse and mule to the brush, then trudge
d toward the creekbank. The only sounds in the forest were his footsteps on the sodden snow, the slur of his elk-hide coat brushing against the leafless branches as he neared his first set. Of a sudden he grew concerned.

  Standing at the snowy edge of the stream, he couldn’t make out the trap pole he had driven into the bottom of the creek several feet from the bank. Kneeling as he shoved his right sleeve to the elbow, Scratch stuffed his bare forearm into the ice-slicked water. Back and forth he carefully fished, his fingers searching—unable to feel the square bow of the iron trap, the wide springs, the pan or trigger or long chain.

  “Goddamned beaver got away with it,” he grumbled as he got to his feet, flinging water off his arm before it turned to ice.

  Later, when the light grew, he’d come back and wade on into this wide part of the stream, to try locating where in this flooded meadow the animal had dragged his trap. Somewhere out there in the faint smear of dawn one of the creatures had freed the trap from the pole, then drowned, sinking to the bottom with the weight locked around its paw. It was only a matter of his wading far enough, long enough, in the icy water to find both trap and beaver.

  For the time being there was enough work pulling up the other fourteen traps, taking yesterday’s catch back to camp for his wife to begin her work fleshing, graining, and stretching. That started, he could return and look for his trap. As costly as such hard goods were in the mountains, a man simply couldn’t stand to lose one of his traps. Sweeping up his rifle and the rawhide trap sack, Scratch backed out of the thick willow and turned upstream.

  A moment later he was standing on the bank, staring out at the glistening surface of the water, bewildered that he was getting so old he had forgotten where he had made the second set. Turning on his heel, he peered across the ground, discovering the stake he had driven into the bank to mark the location of his trap sites. Now he whirled, angry and confused, staring at that point where the frozen ground met the surface of the water, gazing into the stream with a squint to search for the tall pole that always marked the extent of the trap chain that prevented the beaver from reaching the safety of his winter lodge. Out there in the deep water, the creatures would drown—