Ride the Moon Down

by Terry C. Johnston

  He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t noticed it before, but there came one night at the fire while he was scrubbing her face with that coarse rag and scalding water, suddenly aware that he could find no new pustules erupting on her face. And what angry red pockmarks there were no longer oozed and bled near as much as they had in recent days each time he repeatedly washed them.

  Two days later she awoke him from his own fitful sleep, whispering with her raw throat and swollen tongue that she wanted some water. As he poured sips past her cracked, puffy lips, later fed her spoons of hot soup and washed her wounds, Waits-by-the-Water gazed at him for the first time in more than two weeks. The love in those eyes dared him to hope.

  For sixteen days those eyes had remained shut, never looking back at him, not once opening to dispel his doubts, drive away any of his fears. But after all those nights, she finally opened her eyes and looked up at him, soft and thankful. So weary, she did not try speaking any more that day in her exhaustion, even as he clumsily removed her dress and leggings, replaced them with some of his clothing. All she could do was look at him with those eyes.

  Not until the next day did she speak again. “Love Ti-tuzz.”

  And that evening she asked for help walking to the brush so she could relieve herself. She squatted, then pulled herself up against him, and he supported her as they returned to the fire, where she curled up within a new robe and he dragged off the one she had lain in for all those days.

  “What will you sleep in tonight?”

  “I’ll sleep with you again,” he explained.

  “We’ll need the old robe to keep us warm—”

  “Going to burn it before we leave,” he said in English. “And them clothes of your’n too. The sickness is all over em.”

  Better to leave as much of the disease as they could right there on the mountainside, among the ashes of their fire. Bass realized he could replace things, like his missing traps he figured the Blackfoot had thrown away, like the plunder they had shattered and destroyed. Just leave the pox and its evil there on the mountain. Trouble was, they would never leave it all behind. Waits-by-the-Water was going to carry a telling reminder of the pox with her till the end of her days.

  But they still had one another. And they had their children. So Bass remained confident he could rebuild the pieces of their life together. As long as there was beaver in the mountains and as long as the traders hauled their goods out to rendezvous—he’d carve out a life for them … just as long as he and his kind could continue to race across the seasons, as long as they could continue to ride the moon down.

  Many times since that late winter of thirty-eight it had haunted him just how many there were who had given up and abandoned the Rockies. Daniel Potts, and even Jim Beckwith. It troubled him to think back on how fewer and fewer showed up come rendezvous with the arrival of each summer. Sad to watch how many didn’t choose to reoutfit themselves, deciding instead to ride east with the fur caravan, electing to take their wages in hard money once they reached St. Louis. Every summer at least a couple dozen more admitted they were throwing in and giving up.

  “Plunder costs too much,” some groused.

  Others complained, “Beaver’s too low.”

  Still more confessed that a few seasons spent crotch-deep in icy streams, exposed to that unwarmable cold of the mountains for three seasons a year, had aged them well before their years. Titus felt sorry for those who decided to flee back east to what was, back to who they had been. Yet he realized he didn’t have any of that to return to himself.

  For the last few summers he saw how those who were giving up simply freed their Flathead, Shoshone, or Yuta wives to return to their villages, to their parents, taking the half-breed youngsters with them when the winters of marriage were done and the white trapper no longer needed the benefits of his dusky-skinned bedmate.

  But a time or two Titus had heard tell of a man who did take his wife and their children east with him, perhaps to settle somewhere on the frontier that others claimed was inching right to the edge of the rolling prairie itself. There among the pacified Sauk and Fox, among the Osage or those other bands Andy Jackson had driven west, such an old trapper and his family might better mix in with the life of hardworking folks scratching out an existence along that border of the wilderness. Once they were on that backtrail to the settlements, nothing else was ever heard of those men who had returned east in hopes of recapturing some of what life they had left behind, nonetheless unable to let go of a woman and children who were part of another life they had now abandoned.

  Again this summer on Horse Creek, some three dozen company men had turned in their furs, preparing to flee the mountains.

  Sitting there talking with these scarred, old friends, Scratch realized he could never return to the settlements. There wasn’t anything left back there. No family to speak of—no one to make for a sentimental reunion. There had been no real success in the blacksmith trade with Hysham Troost that would lure him back as this beaver trade slowly sank from its lofty heights. And he ruminated that he could never take Waits-by-the-Water onto that rolling land of the buffalo prairie or beyond to those hardwood forests where corncrackers scratched at the ground and raised their fixed communities.

  They were no place to raise children—not back there where the trees grew so tall and thick a man couldn’t see any distance at all, back east where a man looked up only to see a portion of the sky. No place for a child to grow tall and strong as they would here in these mountains, breathing this clean, dry air. Back east, he remembered, the men on that old frontier of hardwood forests had a far different look in their eye than these hivernants of the high Stonies. Back there, closed in with the thick timber and small patches of sky that too often turned gray and drenched them with rain—such men did not possess the far-seeing squint of those iron-forged few who made a home beyond the western prairies.

  Out here a man quickly took on a decidedly distant gaze. He grew accustomed to gazing across great stretches, searching far ridges, studying the skyline for dust or smoke, game or foe, reading those green threads that beckoned him to water as if they were parchment maps, ciphering each swaybacked, snow-covered saddle that allowed him a pass between the mountain peaks—scratching every mile of the journey into the fastness of his memory. This unimaginably huge land required a man to stretch his eyes far beyond what had been required of him in those closed-in, narrow-bounded forests back east.

  Come from what he had been, a man either became much more than what he was back east—or he left his bones to bleach on the banks of some uncharted mountain stream. So again this summer those who realized they had teased and taunted Dame Fate long enough chose to rake in what chips they had left and scurry east. Leaving behind a life. Leaving behind loved ones.

  “I vowed that if the woman died,” Titus quietly explained to the circle of friends that hot summer afternoon, “I wasn’t returning to the Crow.”

  “What of your young’uns?” Elbridge asked.

  He grew thoughtful. “Told myself they’d grow up just fine, took in and raised by them what would come to love li’l Flea and my darling Magpie like their own.”

  “Couldn’t bear to face ’em,” Isaac said.

  “No, wasn’t that a’tall,” Bass replied with a shake of his head. “If’n I’d buried the woman in a tree, proper that way for the wind to take her … I knowed I would ride on down that north side of them mountains, making straight for Blackfoot country.”

  Rufus nodded. “Take you some goddamned hair.”

  “One by one,” Scratch continued. “I’d kill ever’ last one of them bastards I chanced across. Times were at nights while I kept myself awake caring for the woman, I figured how I’d mark the bodies: cutting on ’em, scraping my letters in each one so they’d come to know who I was and what I was about.”

  Solomon glanced at the youngsters nearby and asked, “You never figgered to see your young’uns again?”

  “No,” he confessed. “I was gonna
ride and kill till ever’ one of the Blackfoot was dead … or them sonsabitches kill’t me.”

  Gray sighed. “Lookit your young’uns now, Scratch. Ain’t it turned out for the best you didn’t leave ’em for the Crow to raise? And you ain’t dead and skulped up there in Blackfoot country!”

  “And the woman pulled through,” Graham cheered.

  “Were a bunch more days afore she was strong enough to sit a horse, howsoever,” Bass continued his tale. “I got us back over the pass just a’fore another storm blowed down on us. We made it to some good timber and sat it out whilst she got a bit more of her strength back. Don’t know how many days that was, for I’d stopped a’counting and carving on that ax handle.”

  Day by day they had backtracked for the Crow village, become anxious when they didn’t find it where the lodges had been standing weeks before when the ordeal had begun. As they were pushing out of the abandoned campsite along the snowy ground churned with travois scars, Titus had spotted the scaffold propped across the branches of a distant cottonwood that stood at the base of the rimrock. And from the way the gnarled tree trunk below that robe bundle was marked, they knew it had to be the body of Strikes-in-Camp.

  “Them Crow gave him a decent funeral,” he declared, “even if they never did bring his body into camp—feared as they was of the pox.”

  Beneath the spreading branches of the cottonwood they camped that afternoon, and as Bass built a fire and gathered wood for the night, Waits-by-the-Water knelt and began her mourning. She chopped off more of her hair and tossed it into the wind, those shorn locks grotesquely framing that wounded, pitted face. Tears flowed as she wailed, tearing her coat from her arms so she could slash her flesh until her strength was gone and Bass raised her from the frozen ground, carrying his wife back to the warmth of the fire where he fed her, wrapped her, then rocked her to sleep.

  “After the second day I told the woman it was time for her mourning to be done,” Titus said, looking over to see his young son toddling his way now. “It was time to be finding our young’uns.”

  Some two and a half years old by then, young Flea lumbered the last few yards as his father spread his arms to welcome him. The boy vaulted into the air, sailing into Bass’s arms where he settled into his father’s lap, looking round at the hairy faces gathered there in the afternoon shade as the deerflies droned and Horse Creek gurgled along its sandy bed.

  “How long it take you to find them Crow?” Solomon inquired.

  “Weren’t long, not really,” he said, rubbing Flea’s bushy head affectionately. “They took off right after the four days of mourning for Strikes-in-Camp and them others the Blackfoot killed in the ambush. But we found ’em eventual’.”

  It had made for quite a scene when Bass and Waits-by-the-Water showed up near the camp one day late that winter of 1838. As soon as he had seen the camp guards loping their way, Scratch halted, waiting. Among the sentries had been Pretty On Top.

  The young warrior’s eyes filled with a mist as he whooped, his cry sailing to the cold blue sky of Absaroka as he brought his pony skidding to a stop with the seven others right in front of the white man and his wife who clutched the flaps of her hood over her face, not daring to let these people who had known her from childhood see her wounds.

  “My heart sings!” Pretty On Top cheered, slapping his breast. “You are returned with your wife! How is this that she did not die?”

  “My husband would not let me,” Waits announced from the muffle of her hood, surprising even Titus. “He said I could not die.”

  “Then the medicine of Ti-tuzz is mighty!” cried Three Iron. “In the stories of our great-grandfathers, when the pox visited itself upon us, very few were spared death before the scattering of the bands. So the First Maker has truly smiled on you, Waits-by-the-Water.”

  She had looked over at her husband and said, “Yes, I know how the First Maker has smiled on me.”

  The eight guards yipped and whistled with approval, causing their horses to jostle with the sudden loud exuberance.

  Bass found her eyes smiling at him from the shadows of her hood and said, “Yes, woman—the First Maker has smiled on us both.”

  Little Flea had been at their horses’ legs before the two of them even dismounted beside Bright Wings’s lodge. And Magpie was already reaching her arms to her father as Bass brought his pony to a halt. He had leaned over, caught her by the wrist, and swung her up behind him, marveling at how much it seemed she had grown. As he kissed and hugged her right there on horseback, Waits dropped to the ground to gather little Flea into her arms, smothering him with her kisses. Not knowing what he was doing, the babbling child pushed back the hood—his own eyes suddenly wide with surprise, even fear.

  Around the woman others gasped, fell back a step, as Waits-by-the-Water snatched the hood over her head, beginning to sob because the boy continued to stare at her in shock and fright. But in that next moment Crane emerged from the lodge doorway, her stooped body hurrying to her daughter’s side where she flung her arms around Waits—crying, wailing, sobbing, keening, blubbering all at once.

  Then Bright Wings was there too, the three of them hugging, their arms wrapped around Flea as he rested on his mother’s hip. The moment Magpie and Bass hit the ground, the young girl sprinted to her mother’s side, ducked between some legs, and ended up in the middle of all those women happily reunited.

  Hugging Flea now before the boy toddled off again, Scratch looked at Magpie as she helped her mother cutting moccasin soles. Back then, upon their return to the Crow after chasing down the Blackfoot, Magpie had been no older than Flea was at this moment. But to look at the girl now, tall and long-legged as she was, Titus found it hard to believe so much time had flowed past since that winter of the Blackfoot … realizing again that his daughter was more than four years old.

  At times that late winter and on into the spring, Pretty On Top and his companions—Red Leggings, Comes Inside the Door, Sees the Star, and Crow Shouting—would ask to join the white man when he packed up and rode away from the village for two weeks or more at a time. By day the bored young warriors might follow Titus to the icy banks of the flooding streams, amused and intrigued by the trapper’s rituals. Most mornings one of the Crow would ride out to spend the day circling the surrounding territory, searching for any sign of enemy encroachment while he hunted for fresh meat.

  Days later, with a load of beaver for Waits-by-the-Water to flesh and his own heart yearning to hold her, eager to embrace his children, Bass would turn around and return to Yellow Belly’s village. For two, sometimes three nights he would remain at the woman’s side, each day spent hunting elk and deer or mountain sheep for his wife’s big family, coupling with her, wrestling with his children and those cousins who now had no father of their own. Once he was assured the group had enough meat to last them many days, Titus packed up again and headed into the high country—sometimes alone, often joined by the young warriors.

  With each subsequent journey as those weeks passed, Scratch was able to push higher into the hills, farther upstream, always there when the beaver emerged from their winter lodges to make repairs on their dams.

  “We figgered you’d gone under for sartin,” Rufus confessed now. “When you didn’t come in for ronnyvoo on the Popo Agie last summer.”

  “Why’d the booshways move ronnyvoo there ’stead of here on the Green where they said they’d meet the brigades?” Titus asked.

  Elbridge explained, “Goddamned company booshways changed it on us when they growed tired of allays having Hudson’s Bay show up ever’ summer over here in this country.”

  “Englishers got to be a bit of a problem with the free men, so it seemed,” Solomon said. “They was offering a good price on fur over at Fort Hallee, and wasn’t asking so much for their trade goods neither.”

  “Wonder why we ain’t see’d hide nor ha’r of John Bull yet this summer?” Bass reflected.

  Isaac said, “Maybeso they don’t know we’re here this year fo
r ronnyvoo.”

  “Chances are better them English don’t give a damn ’bout coming to ronnyvoo no more,” Solomon observed, “what with the trade ain’t being what it used to be.”

  “Damned good to see you’re still standing on your pins, Titus Bass,” Gray said. “We was a’feared you’d gone under.”

  “Way things was,” Bass began, hoisting the restless boy out of his lap, kissing Flea on the cheek, then sending the naked child on his way, “I didn’t figger the woman was much ready to be around white folks. So I had me a choice of coming to ronnyvoo all on my lonesome … or sticking close to her and the young’uns.”

  “You said them Blackfoot gone and ruin’t some of your plunder,” Isaac said. “How in blazes’d you fare ’thout them supplies what you’d get at ronnyvoo?”

  He gazed at the two children playing in the grass beneath a great clump of willow. “We made out fine,” Bass said quietly. “High summer—when the beaver ain’t fit for a red piss—I packed up all I had and rode ’em over to the mouth of the Tongue.”

  “Tullock’s fort?” asked Gray.

  Titus nodded. “Van Buren. Me and Sam’l dickered and drank, then dickered some more. All in all, he’s a good man. That coon spent plenty of time trapping beaver his own self. Knows how it be to freeze your balls to catch poor plew. Tullock done the best by me his company would let him.”

  Graham inquired, “He get all your fur last year?”

  “Most. Even this summer I could trade it to the company here, or I could trade it to the company at Tullock’s Crow post. Don’t make me no differ’nce,” Scratch confided. “Only differ’nce is, this nigger sure missed his companyeros when he don’t come in for that ronnyvoo on the Popo Agie.”

  “Weren’t much of a hurraw last summer,” Solomon grumbled.

  Rufus agreed. “Lookee round you right here, goddammit. Ain’t much to ronnyvoo at all no more.”