Scratch’s fingers found the rifle, dragged it into both hands as he leaped to his feet, swinging his arms overhead as he rushed forward, yelling a guttural, unintelligible sound that welled up from the pit of him as he lunged toward the wolf and dog.
The cool air of that summer night fairly hissed as it was sliced with such force—driving the butt of his long full-stock Derringer flintlock rifle against the wolf’s backbone. The creature grunted and yelped but did not relinquish its hold on Zeke. Yellow eyes glared primally at the man.
“You goddamned sonuvabitch!” he roared as he flung the rifle overhead again.
Driving it down into the attacker a second time, Bass forced the wolf to release its hold on Zeke. Now it staggered around to face the man on three legs, that fourth still imprisoned in the dog’s jaws. Then with a powerful snap the wolf seized Zeke’s nose in his teeth, clamping down for that moment it took to compel the dog to release the bloody leg.
Whimpering, Zeke pulled free of this last attacker, freeing the wolf to whirl back around. It crouched, its head slung between its front shoulders, snarling at the man.
Once more Scratch brought his rifle back behind his head, stretching that torn flesh in the left shoulder.
He was already swinging the moment the wolf left the ground. The rifle collided with the predator less than an arm’s span away. With a high-pitched yelp the wolf tumbled to the ground. Scratch was on him, slamming the rifle’s iron butt-plate down into the predator’s head again, then again.
Remembering other thieves of the forest, he flushed with his hatred of their kind.
Over and over he brought the rifle up and hurtled it down savagely, finally stopping as he realized he had no idea how long he had been beating the beast’s head to pulp.
“Zeke,” he whispered even before he turned.
Staggering toward the dog, Bass knelt beside the big gray animal. Weakly the dog raised its head, whimpered a bit, then laid its bloody muzzle in Scratch’s hand. He quickly ran a hand over the animal’s throat, fingers finding warm, sticky blood clotting in the thick hair. Then he dragged his hand over much of the rib cage, the soft underbelly, finding no other wounds to speak of.
“Can you get up, boy?” he asked in a hopeful whisper. “Can you?”
Patting the dog on the head, Titus stood shakily himself. “C’mon now, you can get up, cain’t you?”
God, how his heart ached—not wanting to lose this dog the way he had lost Hannah, the way he lost so many other good friends—the way he almost lost Josiah.
“C’mon, boy,” he urged as if it were a desperate prayer.
With a struggle Zeke dragged his legs under him, thrashed a bit, then lurched upward onto all four. The dog staggered forward a few steps as Bass crouched, welcoming the animal into his arms. Zeke collapsed again, panting, his breath shallow and ragged.
“Good ol’ boy!” he cried louder now, his face wet with tears. “We got ’em, didn’t we? Got ’em all!”
He needed light to look over the dog’s wounds.
Gazing east, he figured it was nowhere near getting time for dawn. They could light a fire and he could see to Zeke before packing up and setting out early. Be gone by the time anyone who had spotted their fire could get close.
For several minutes he knelt there stroking the animal as it laid against him, its breath growing more regular. Then he remembered Waits. She would have heard the shots and could well be near out of her mind with fright by now.
“We ought’n go back,” he whispered as he bent over, stabbing his arms under the big animal, pulling the dog against him as he staggered to his feet.
Its fur was warm and damp against the one arm as he started back toward their shelter in the dark, his bare feet feeling their way through the grass.
She was standing there against the trees in front of their blankets, holding a rifle ready as he emerged from the gloom. With a tiny shriek she dropped the heavy weapon and dashed toward him, throwing her arms around his neck, clinging against Bass and the dog.
“He is wounded?” she asked in Crow as she drew back, swiping tears away with both hands.
“Yes, but I won’t know how bad until I get a fire going.”
“Your daughter is sleeping,” she said as she began to turn. “I will start the fire. You stay with the dog.”
“That sure as hell is one ugly critter of a dog!”
From the way the speaker was smiling, Bass could easily see the man meant no harm by his critical judgment.
“I take it you’re a man what knows his dogs?” Titus asked as he neared the bare-chested white trapper who had stepped out from the trees and willows that lined the south side of Ham’s Fork of the Green River where every shady, cloistered spot was littered with canvas tents, lean-tos, and bowers made of blankets and oiled sheeting.
Awful quiet here for a rendezvous, Titus had been thinking ever since their tiny procession marched off the bluff and made their way into the gently meandering valley. But, after all, it was the middle of a summer afternoon and a smart man laid out that hottest time of the day.
The stranger whistled to the dog and knelt. “He your’n?”
Bass reined to a halt as Waits came up beside him. “Zeke’s his name.”
Patting and scratching the big dog’s head, the man observed, “He been in a scrap of recent, ain’t he?”
“Pertecting our camp from a pack of wolves.”
The man cupped Zeke’s jaw in a hand and peered into the dog’s eyes. “Had me a dog not too different’n this’un back in the States when I was a growing lad.” Then he sighed. “Likely he’s gone under by now. Be real old if he ain’t.”
“My name’s Bass. Titus Bass,” and Scratch held down his hand to the stranger.
“You’re a free man, I take it?” the stranger asked as they shook.
“Trap on my own hook,” he replied.
“Then you’re likely the Bass a feller was lookin’ for, asking if you’d come in when they arrived a week or so back.”
His eyes warily squinted as he searched the nearby groves of trees and canvas. “Someone asking after me?”
“Big feller, English-tongued he was—”
“By damn, them Britishers here again this summer?”
“They are for sure.”
“Where’s their camp?”
“Off yonder,” and he pointed. “My name’s Neis Dixon. Ride with Drips.”
“He that booshway with American Fur?”
Dixon threw a thumb, gesturing over his shoulder. “Him and Font’nelle. That’s us over there.”
“Good to know you,” Bass replied. “Where the free men camped?”
“Some here and some there. Rocky Mountain Fur settled in on upstream ’bout eight miles or so. Sublette come in with his goods to trade, with ’nother feller too.” Then, after he glanced quickly at the woman and the child she had lashed inside that Flathead cradleboard swinging from the tall pommel at the front of her saddle, Dixon asked, “How long you been out here to the mountains?”
Scratch smiled. “Come out spring of twenty-five.”
“Damn—you mean to tell me you was a Ashley man for that first ronnyvoo?”
Wagging his head, Bass replied, “Didn’t see my first ronnyvoo till twenty-six. But I made ever’ one since.”
“That makes nine of ’em, Bass.”
Drawing himself up, Scratch sighed. “Time was, I didn’t figure I’d ever see near this many ronnyvooz, Dixon. S’pose it’s nigh onto time for us to make camp.”
“That sure is a handsome woman,” the man declared, backing one step to grab himself a last admiring look at Waits-by-the-Water. “I take it she yours.”
“My wife. Crow. They are a handsome people. We been together for more’n a year now,” then he nudged his heels into the buffalo runner’s ribs.
“Handsome woman, Titus Bass,” Dixon repeated. “But, like I said, that sure is one ugly dog!”
“Thankee kindly,” Scratch replied with a wide, brown
-toothed grin. “Thankee on both counts!”
As the infant suckled at her breast, Waits-by-the-Water watched her husband call the dog over to have it lay beside him as he squatted at their small fire. She studied how the man scratched its torn ears, the scarred snout, that thick neck the wolf tried vainly to crush—seeing how gently her husband’s hands treated the big dog, recalling how his hands ignited a fire in her.
Her husband loved his animals, the buffalo pony and mule, and now this dog too. Almost as much as she knew he loved her and their daughter.
“Have you decided upon a name?” she asked.
He stared at the flames awhile. The only sound besides the crackling of their fire were the shouts and laughter from down the valley where the many white men camped and celebrated. How the white man could celebrate!
“No,” he finally admitted, not taking his eyes off the fire. “This is so important, I do not want to make a mistake.”
“Who do you want to name her if you don’t?” she asked.
Her husband turned to look at her. “Isn’t it the father who gives a name among your people?”
“It is one of the father’s family.”
Wagging his head, Bass peered back at the flames. “Besides the two of you, I don’t have any family out here. I might as well not have any family left back there anyway. So there is no one to name our daughter but me.”
“Arapooesh calls you his brother.”
Nodding, Bass replied, “Yes, Rotten Belly is like a brother.”
“Perhaps he can help us when we return to my people for the winter, chil’ee, my husband.” She sighed and gently pulled her wet nipple from the babe’s slack mouth. Waits laid the sleeping infant beside her and pulled the corner of a blanket over the child.
“I am anxious to see Rotten Belly,” Scratch admitted. “It will be two winters since we have talked and smoked together.”
“A good man, my uncle is,” she said, scooting over to sit alongside him. “You have decided where we will go when we leave this place of many white men?”
“We will ride north when we go. There are beaver still to trap in Absaroka. We can take our time and work slowly north through the mountains while the flat-tails put on their winter fur, then find Rotten Belly’s camp for the winter.”
She grinned. “I will be going back to my people a married woman.”
“And a mother,” he added, looping an arm over her shoulder and pulling her against him. “Mother of a beautiful daughter.”
“You still think of me as beautiful too?”
Staring her full in the face, his brow knit with concern. “I don’t ever want you to feel anything less than beautiful—for you are all my sunrises and all my sunsets. The way the light strikes a high-country pool.”
“You still think of me as your lover?” she asked, slipping her fingers beneath the flap of his breechclout to barely brush his manhood lying there under the layer of wool.
Waits wanted him now. All too fleeting were their moments alone. How desperately she wanted to know that he still thought of her as a woman, that the fire between them had not diminished now that she had given birth to their daughter.
“Feel what you are doing to that-which-rises,” he said with a groan of pleasure. “Then you tell me if I could ever forget you were the lover I’ve searched for all my life.”
Strange how it made it hard to breathe each time she felt him stiffen beneath her touch, sensing how her heart started to gallop. Then too, she always felt a tensing, a teasing flutter, that heated warmth begin down below where she craved him so. Now she snaked her fingers beneath the breechclout and touched his flesh. Just stroking him like this made her grow ready for him.
She nestled her head into the crook of his shoulder as his hand probed through the large open sleeve of her dress and found her breast. He found her nipple hardened in anticipation.
“How long are you going to do that?” he asked. “Do you want to feel me explode in your hand?”
“No,” she answered, and pulled her hand away from his quivering flesh, leaning back so that she freed her breast from his hand.
Onto her knees she rocked, bending over to yank aside his breechclout, there beside the firepit where she could gaze at the hardness of him. It made her wetter in anticipation as Waits-by-the-Water seized both sides of her buckskin dress and yanked it up to her hips as she swiveled herself atop him on her knees. Taking that rigid flesh in one hand, she planted the head of him against her dampness as she guided his other hand back into the wide, loose sleeve of her dress where he could fondle her breast.
He responded savagely, imprisoning that firm, milky mound so roughly that she would have cried out in pain had she not already grown accustomed to his all-consuming hunger, his passion when they coupled.
Both of them groaned together as she eased down upon his shaft, descending far too slowly for him.
Her husband suddenly thrust his hips upward against her, seating himself inside her warmth with a feral grunt of pleasure before he began to sway beneath her.
Interlacing her fingers behind his neck, she leaned back to the full length of her arms as he bent forward to bite at one of her breasts through the thin hide of her dress. How she loved to feel the rhythmic bouncing of her breasts as the two of them rocked together, locked as one.
But of a sudden he pulled his head away from the breast and yanked at the dress, shoving it up from her hips and over her shoulders as she stretched her arms to the starlit sky where the fireflies of sparks rose beyond the tops of the cottonwood trees. First to one side, then to the other they leaned, struggling to get her dress off her arms and over her head … until he held the rumpled mass in one hand, and tossed it toward their bedding.
Again she locked her fingers behind his arms as he bent forward to lick at her nipples, first one, then the other. She knew he was lapping at the warm milk that she could sense oozing from them as she neared the peak of her passion. Inside her he was growing even bigger, ready to explode and fill her with his release. He told her how he loved to suckle at her breasts, just enough to taste the milk her body fed their daughter. In little more than a moon since the birth, she had come to know how passionate her husband grew as he nursed on her. How mad it made him as he drove in and out of her with a rising fury.
Then she heard his rapid breathing become ragged, as if the sound caught on something low in his throat—knowing that he was close. And with that realization she suddenly reached her peak, sensing a flood sweep through her just as surely as there would be if he had torn down a high-country dam and what had been a flooded meadow rushed downslope between two narrow banks.
Her quivering thighs.
She felt as if her legs were the banks of that mountain stream suddenly released. Starting somewhere inside her belly where she had carried their daughter, Waits sensed the gushing wave wash downward, down, down over his manhood imprisoned inside her, on down as it swept over them both while their rhythm slowed like the passing of a stampede.
Not the hurtling passage of massive, lumbering, ground-shaking buffalo … but the breathless, fleeting passage of wild horses—their nostrils flaring, their eyes wide with wind-borne lust, their manes and tails blowing free in the wind.
She could tell he had enjoyed it as he pulled back from her and gazed into her eyes. He didn’t have to speak for her to know.
Her husband licked his lips and said, “There is no finer woman than you in all this world. With all I have done wrong, with all the folks I didn’t mean to hurt but ended up hurting anyway over the years … I don’t know how I ever became worthy of your love.”
“The Grandfather Above has smiled on us both,” she whispered against his cheek, closing her eyes and wishing this moment would never end. Then of a sudden she rocked back and smiled at him, saying, “One Above smiled on me a little earlier in my life than he did in yours!”
“That doesn’t mean I’m going to die anytime soon, woman.”
Holding his face between
her hands as she felt him continue to soften within her, Waits said, “You have lived through so many deaths already, I grow so afraid you won’t live through any more.”
Bass pulled her against him fiercely, kissing her wet, warm mouth. When he could no longer hold his breath, he pulled away, gasping, and said, “I have so much to live for now, I wouldn’t dare go and poke a stick in death’s hornet’s nest, woman.”
Resting her cheek against his shoulder, Waits felt guilty that his words gave her so little relief.
Finally she said, “I will consider those words as your vow to me, husband.”
“You have my promise—till the day we part in death.”
* One-Eyed Dream
2
“Maybe I should catch this strange-looking fish!”
At her giggle Bass turned his head to find his wife standing among the willows on the creekbank. “You already caught your fish, woman. Come in with me—the water feels almost as good as you this morning.”
Before ever worrying about breakfast this morning, he had tagged along with her to a secluded part of the stream where she would have a little privacy to bathe the baby. There he tied off their two horses while Waits-by-the-Water pushed through a gap in the willows to reach the edge of the creek where she found a small strip of open ground covered with grass, shaded by some young cottonwood saplings.
As she began to unwind all the swaddling wrapped around the child, he pulled off his grimy calico shirt, moccasins, and leggings, then dropped his breechclout on the bank before tiptoeing into the cool water. Finding it cold enough that morning to make him shiver with those first few steps, Titus finally eased himself beneath the surface until he sat submerged, water lapping up to his shoulders.
But he was standing now, scrubbing his skinny legs with creek-bottom sand, when she called him an odd-looking fish.
Scratch stopped, peered down, studying himself a moment there in the new day’s light. “You afraid to come in here and swim with this fish you caught?”
“Never did I realize how truly white you are for a white man!” she snorted, putting her fingers over her lips to stifle a giggle.
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