Wind Walker

by Terry C. Johnston

  Dusting her hands on her big white apron, she beamed. “That’s why Charlotte be the cook, Mr. Bass. So’s I can fill up bellies till they’re bustin’!”

  “You tell them young’uns of mine I’ll be back after I’ve looked up an ol’ friend down to the Cheyenne camp,” he explained as he pulled on his coat and started toward the door. “I figger you’ll keep ’em fed and warm right here till I come back.”

  “I can allays find something for your chirrun to do for me ’round here,” Charlotte vowed. “’Specially that girl of yours. My, oh, my—she’s gonna be a sure-fire handful of ring-tail cats one of these days, you mind my word, Mr. Bass. She’s got that light of trouble sparkin’ in her eye!”

  Didn’t he know that already, Titus thought as he shouldered the corral gate closed, then strode off toward the far grove of cottonwood on foot, scuffing through the old snow in those thick, hair-on winter moccasins. He damn well realized how Magpie had her father wrapped around her little finger, what with the way she had learned to flash her pretty eyes at him all the time. Come a day when she’d be batting those eyes at some young buck of a suitor. Leastways, he had begun to hope it would be a young warrior … and not some half-baked, green-hided, soaked-behind-the-ears white youngster fresh out of the settlements.

  Back when he had first taken a shine to Waits-by-the-Water, Titus Bass was notching his ninth winter in the mountains. With their daughter’s mixed blood, Magpie deserved a man bred to these mountains, and not no snot-nosed young’un who didn’t know prime from stinkum.

  Three older Cheyenne men stood off to the side of the first lodges as Scratch came across the open ground. He was carrying no rifle or smoothbore—surely they could see that. All three wrapped in a buffalo robe, the Cheyenne watched him warily as he approached—he was sure they had a good suspicion that he wouldn’t have come without some weapon on him somewhere. When he was less than twenty feet away, Titus stopped and held one arm up in greeting. Then he pulled off a mitten and quickly yanked at the long ties that held the flaps of his elkhide coat closed. There he patted the big pistol stuffed in the front of his belt.

  The moment one of the trio nodded and started his way, the other two shuffled off in different directions. Bass stopped in front of the camp guard, realizing he didn’t know a damned word of the man’s language—wondering for a moment if any of these three had been among those Sioux raiders who had chased him and Shad Sweete down when they were on their way to Fort Davy Crockett in Brown’s Hole. Too late for him to worry about them recognizing an old, gray-headed trapper from that many summers ago.

  “Sweete?” he asked, using his friend’s name.

  The Cheyenne barely shrugged.

  “Big man,” and Titus held up a flattened hand half a foot over their heads. “Big, big man.” As the warrior’s eyes warily studied that hand, Bass brought both his arms up, fingers tapping his own shoulders, then moved his hands out all that much wider to show the wide span of Shadrach Sweete’s muscular frame.

  With no more than the slightest gesture, the warrior in the buffalo robe indicated he wanted the white man to follow him into camp. Follow him he did, scuffing through the length of the Cheyenne camp scattered among the old Cottonwood growing back from the annual floodplain of the Arkansas. At the far edge of the treeline, the Cheyenne stopped and pointed out a young woman patiently trudging around the side of a squat, small-flapped hide lodge. She had a small, bowlegged infant slowly taking some first, tentative steps beside her.

  “Sweete?” Bass asked. “She know about Sweete?”

  “Sweete,” the man repeated, speaking for the first time. Then he motioned for the white man to go on before the warrior pulled his hand beneath the buffalo robe’s warmth once more and turned away.

  “Sweete?” Titus asked as he approached the lodge, immediately drawing the young woman’s attention.

  She cocked her head to the side and repeated, “Sweete?”

  “Yes—he here?”

  “Shad-rach Sweete?” She repeated the three syllables with practiced certainty.

  “You know Shadrach, do you?” he said with a grin, relieved. Then he started for the door of the lodge, figuring his old friend was inside.

  “Sweete,” she said, stepping between Bass and the open doorway as a young boy appeared from the firelit interior. Pointing off toward the far willows, she indicated a patch of open ground where some more of the band’s ponies were grazing on grass blown clear of crusty snow.

  “He’s not here? That it? Sweete’s gone off to the ponies?”

  She bent her head this way, then that way, almost the way a dog would listen intently to its master’s words. “Sweete go.”

  “Yeah, Sweete go to the ponies?”

  “Goddamn!” the voice thundered behind him. “Can’t a man go take a piss ’thout some mule-headed idjit come callin’ after him?”

  “As I live an’ breathe!” Bass gushed as he wheeled around, spotting Shadrach threading his way through the bare-limbed cottonwood. “So you stand up and take a piss just like a real man now, do you?”

  “Shit—what would you know about real men, you half-growed strip of spit-out mulehide!”

  “Don’t you ever say nothin’ mean agin no mules!” Scratch roared back as the man who easily went half-a-foot again over six feet tall, just as Sweete enfolded the shorter man in his big arms.

  The smell of Shadrach—a free man’s mix of woodsmoke and gun oil, burnt powder and stale tobacco both—how it evoked so many bittersweet memories that Bass felt his eyes begin to sting. As his old friend loosened his grip, Scratch reached up with both hands and pulled Sweete’s face down to his, promptly planting a wet kiss on both of Shadrach’s cheeks.

  “Damn, but it’s good to see you too, Titus Bass,” Sweete said in a husky whisper laden with deep emotion.

  For a long moment there, Scratch could not speak. He hadn’t expected to be choked up this way with the reunion. Finally he said, “Was told up to the fort you was down here with Gray Thunder’s bunch. Knowed sometime back that you run off to the blanket with these here no-good Cheyennes.”

  Sweete looped a muscular arm over Bass’s shoulder. “Pray tell, when you hear of that?”

  “Can’t recollect if it were someone right here at Fort William or not,” he replied, a little aggravated that he couldn’t scratch up the proper notion. “Or, maybe it were on up the Arkansas at Fisher’s pueblo.”

  Sweete waved for the young woman to move in their direction. “What’d they tell you ’bout me?”

  “Said you was lookin’ to scare up some folks to take you in when Vaskiss and Sublette folded and closed down their fort on the South Platte. Said you was fixin’ to head out for to find a band of Cheyenne where you ended up takin’ a shine to a gal.”

  “This here’s that gal,” Sweete announced, strong affection in his voice. “Titus—want you to meet Shell Woman.”

  “Shell Woman.” Scratch bobbed his head in recognition.

  “She knows her name in American talk,” Shad explained. “Ciphers more an’ more American talk all the time. Most times I call her Toote.”

  “Toote?”

  Shad smiled toothily. “Like them Frenchies say: ‘Toote suite,’ I call her Toote.”

  Nodding his head to the pretty woman, Bass said, “Toote it is.”

  Dropping to one knee, Titus asked, “This li’l pup your’n?”

  Quickly scooping the child off the ground and cradling her in his big arms, Shadrach said, “This here li’l doe-eyed gal is my daughter, Pipe Woman.”

  “She is a purty one, Shad,” Bass agreed. “Good thing she takes after her mama, ol’ coon. Ugly a nigger as you are, I don’t figger you’d be a man to throw good-lookin’ young’uns.”

  “Shit, look who’s talkin’ ugly!” Sweete growled, then turned to Shell Woman and spoke quickly in Cheyenne before she turned away. “My darlin’ baby here was born year ago last winter. And I want you to see my boy—he’s older’n my girl. I sent the woman to f
etch him.”

  “Jehoshaphat! You got two young’uns?” Scratch cried. “Been keeping that poor woman heavy with child, ain’cha?”

  The proud radiance on Shad’s face drained to a look of pained sympathy. “When Shell Woman give birth to the girl here—she had her a long, hard fight of it. From that day on she said she knowed something tore inside her, knowed she’d never have ’nother child after the girl. I allays wanted more young’uns when it came my time to settle down …” A look of quiet resignation came over him. “These two—why, they be all any father could pray for—”

  Bursting from the lodge door toddled a small boy, somewhat lighter skinned than his baby sister, but every bit as black-headed as their mother. He sprinted across the icy snow, his small capote slurring the snowy ground as his tiny legs pumped him toward his father. Reaching Shadrach, the child flung his arms around his father’s leg and clamped on fiercely.

  “He was still sleepin’ when I left to take my piss in the brush,” Sweete explained. With one of his big hands, he gently turned the boy’s head so the boy was looking up at the stranger. After saying something in Cheyenne to the child, Shad told Bass, “This here’s High-Backed Bull. He’s allays been a cantankerous sort if’n he don’t get his way.”

  “Some young’uns just like that.”

  “But, his mother an’ me can usual’ calm him when he gets real excitable,” Sweete said. Then Sweete gazed directly at Bass. “You just come down from the north country?”

  “Afore last fall.”

  “What you hear of Bridger up that way?”

  Scratch smiled at the remembrance. “You an’ him … allays was best of friends.”

  “You’re the best friend a man could have too, Titus Bass,” Shad admitted.

  “Still, I reckon you an’ Gabe allays will be best friends since’t you come out west with Ashley together,” Scratch explained. “Back then both of you ’bout as young and green as they come.”

  “Jim, he was seventeen in twenty-five,” Sweete reminisced.

  “An’ you was a big lad for fifteen … seems how you told me that story a hunnert times if you told me once’t!”

  Shad tousled his boy’s hair and inquired, “Didn’t you reach the mountains in twenty-five?”

  “Yep—come out on my own,” Scratch reflected. “Prob’ly come close to starvin’ half a dozen times afore three fellas run onto me and showed me the way the stick floats—”

  “Why the hell didn’t I think afore!” Shad exclaimed. “You come outta Crow country alone? Or, you bring your woman and young’uns?”

  “They all come with me,” Bass explained. “Never gonna go much of anywhere ’thout them now. Was too long out west to steal some Mexican horses in Californy—ain’t gonna stay away from my kin nowhere near that long again.”

  “Stole Mex horses, did you?”

  “OF Solitaire, Peg-Leg, passel of others—some good men, others awready turned snake-bellied thieves,” Scratch declared.

  “You tell me all about it tonight over some elk?”

  “That mean you’re inviting me for dinner?”

  Sweete shook his head. “Naw. I figgered to invite Waits-by-the-Water for dinner, have your family meet mine … so I figger you’ll be tagging along anyways.”

  Balling up a fist, he started to hurl his arm at his tall friend, but Shadrach caught the fist in his huge paw. “Best you save your energy, ol’ man—’stead of throwing punches at me! Gray as you got in these last few winters, time sure has to be gnawin’ at your heels.”

  “How long’s it been, Shadrach—since we last see’d each other?”

  “Was it them last sad ronnyvoo days back to forty?”

  “Maybeso it’s been that long,” Bass admitted after a moment. “No matter how many year it was, allays too long to go ’thout seein’ good friends.”

  “Companyeros from the shinin’ times.” Sweete laid his hand on Bass’s shoulder.

  “Them was glory days, Shadrach,” he whispered with an anguished remembrance. “Them really was our glory days.”

  * One-Eyed Dream

  * Death Rattle

  THREE

  Shad Sweete passed the pipe to Titus Bass and asked, “How come you won’t wait till green-up afore you push on north?”

  “Wanna be in Crow country by summer,” Scratch replied. “I lollygag around these parts with you till spring, why—summer gonna be over time I reach Yellowstone country.”

  As Titus brought the pipestem to his lips and sucked in that warm and heady smoke of Shad’s tobacco smoldering in the redstone pipebowl, he glanced over at his wife as she gently rocked the sleeping Jackrabbit in her lap. Magpie and Flea were already lying back-to-back between their parents, curled up beneath a blanket, eyes closed to the crimson light flutting against the inside of the buffalo-hide lodge cover. Swaying shadows climbed with the converging poles toward the smoke hole and that black triangle of starry sky over their heads. Opposite the fire sat Shell Woman, her son’s head propped against her leg and her infant daughter asleep at her bared breast.

  Right from their arrival in Gray Thunder’s camp late that afternoon, Scratch had sensed the courteous strain, a civil tension, that electrified the air as the two women were brought together in these most unusual circumstances. Their peoples, Crow and Cheyenne, had been at war all the way back to those generations of elders who remembered long-ago-told stories of conflicts and hatred between the tribes when they both had lived far, far to the east of the Missouri River. Migrating west had given the Crow only a temporary respite from war against the Cheyenne. Generations after they had fled the valley of the Upper Missouri for the country of the Yellowstone and Bighorn Rivers, the Cheyenne had begun to mosey west too.

  “But Shadrach’s wife isn’t from one of those sneaky bunches who trouble the Apsaluuke farther north,” Titus had attempted to explain to his wife after telling her they were invited to dinner that evening in Gray Thunder’s camp. “This bunch never has killed a white man. Always traded with whites. Made friends with the Bents and others for their own good: guns and powder, beads and brass.”

  “Maybe they are friends with your people, Ti-tuzz,” she had responded grimly. “But I see or hear nothing to show me Gray Thunder’s people haven’t murdered my people when they had the chance.”

  “This village has never been north of the South Platte,” he had explained in American. “Other’ns do run with them Sioux. They’re the Cheyenne making trouble up north. But this bunch—”

  “Stay south.” She interrupted him in American too. Then continued in her own tongue, “They are not my kind, Ti-tuzz. But because I feel safe with you, I will go where you take me, as I always have gone to be at your side.”

  “What are your kind, Waits-by-the-Water?” he had made the mistake of asking, pricking her pride. “There any tribe what you Crow get along with good enough to call your kind?”

  “Flathead. Josiah’s woman—Looks Far Woman—she probably is my kind,” she declared in Crow.

  “Dammit,” he grumbled in exasperation. “It’s clear as sun there ain’t very many of your kind, woman—because the Crow are at war with most ever’body around ’em.”

  “Except the white man,” she had reminded him with a soft smile. “I always liked Shadrach fine.”

  “Then you come tonight to see ol’ Shadrach again?”

  With her lips momentarily pressed into a grim line of thoughtfulness, Waits finally nodded once. “I will meet this Cheyenne wife of his, and see the children Shadrach has made with her too. Then I will judge if there is any chance for two enemies to feel safe in the company of one another.”

  “And become friends,” he urged.

  Her eyes looked squarely into his. “Maybe to be friends is a lot harder thing, so you must be patient for what may never happen. To feel safe … that is enough for now.”

  All evening there had been that tense civility between the two women—both aware their husbands had been the best of friends and trapping partner
s, men who had protected and nourished their own friendship.

  “Shell Woman may feel like she’s the outsider here,” Shad whispered as the fire crackled in the pit near their feet.

  “But, this be her home,” Titus responded quietly.

  “Can’t you see—you an’ me, an’ Waits too, we all knowed each other years ago when the two of us trapped together, Scratch. Shell Woman an’ our young’uns ain’t been around the rest of you none, the way I was. I’m sartin she feels this here’s a case where ever’body knows ever’body but her.”

  “Such things take time, Shadrach,” Titus consoled as he handed the pipe back to its owner. “You’ll recollect that no matter how many times you and me crossed trails in them early years, it weren’t until the last of the beaver trade we finally come to be friends.”

  “Most all this afternoon while’st I was waiting for supper-time and you to be coming, I been thinking a lot on them times. How you said they was our glory days,” Sweete sighed. “How you s’pose Gabe’s doing over to his post?”

  “What I heard, Jim’s full o’ pluck and doing fine.”

  “You ain’t never been there yourself?”

  “Not once,” Titus admitted. “After we talked ’bout Gabe this mornin’, more I cogitated on it, an’ the more it made sense to take me a ride on west to the Green and have a look at what Bridger’s been doing with hisself after all these years.”

  Shad leaned forward to whisper, “You s’pose he’s still in business with Vaskiss over west of the mountains?”

  “They’re both likely lads; I figger they had the gumption to make a go of damned near anything they ever set their minds to.”

  Shadrach quivered a little with anticipation. “So you’re goin’ to see him, Scratch?”

  He glanced for a moment at his woman, found her smiling at him as she sat listening to their man-talk, her legs folded to the side in that woman way of hers, rocking their youngest. Her smile always reassured him.

  “Yeah, Shadrach,” he replied. “Fixin’ to drop in on Bridger, have a look at his new diggin’s, sit and palaver ’bout the ol’ days for a spell afore we tramp on down the Wind River for Crow country.”