Wind Walker

by Terry C. Johnston

  Shell Woman was apparently the first to hear their horses, even before Ghost and Digger did. She arose at the fire, turning, and moved in their direction. Wrapped in her blanket, she was only a few strides away from the horsemen when she noticed the bloodstained coat and that crude bandage of frozen green buffalo hide—and lunged to a halt beside Shadrach’s horse, her fingers in midair, hesitating to touch the thick wrapping.

  “He said you’d know what to do,” Bass started to explain, then stilled his tongue when he realized Shell Woman didn’t understand much American, and he couldn’t speak any Cheyenne.

  As soon as she had freed the yapping, eager dogs from their rope restraints, Waits-by-the-Water was hurrying his way, her eyes flicking from his face to Shadrach and back again. “I’m whole,” he said to her. “It’s Shad. Got took by some wolves.”

  As he landed woodenly on the ground, she buried her face in his neck, wordlessly.

  Having his arms around her again was like being home. But a thought scared him anew. Titus whispered against her hair, “Are you real?”

  She pulled her face away from his chest, then tore off one of his mittens. Pitching it aside, she brought his hand to her cold cheek, where he could feel the tracks of hot moisture spilling from her eyes. “Can you feel how real I am?”

  “I-I thought this all was … my death dream,” he whispered as he crushed her against him anew. “Dreaming of being back with you, when I was really froze to death out there in the dark.”

  “You won’t see your death dream for many, many seasons to come,” she assured him with a sob.

  Nearby, Sweete was clumsily attempting to twist himself around in the saddle.

  “Wait, Shad,” Bass ordered as he tore himself away from his wife. “I’ll come help you an’ Shell Woman.”

  As Titus pulled the big man out of his frozen saddle, he grunted, “Flea, get the meat off the packhorse. Give it to your sister. You build up the fire while Magpie cuts off some meat to roast for us. We ain’t et … not in a long time.”

  Without a word of reply from either of them, Flea and Magpie went to work as Waits hurried away to fetch her parfleche filled with roots and leaves, spores and spiders’ webs.

  The moment she and Bass had Shadrach lowered to the ground at the side of the crackling fire, Shell Woman tenderly kissed her husband on the forehead. Her tears glistened on both cheeks, narrow, shimmering streams tracing the roundness of her cheeks as she turned away from the flickering light and went to search among her own baggage.

  With a painful sigh, Shad began to talk to her in Cheyenne. Back and forth they spoke in low tones. Scratch figured Sweete was explaining to her what had happened with the wolves, how they fought off the beasts, and Bass’s attempt to stem the flow of blood. On the far side of the fire little Jackrabbit sat up among the mounds of blankets and robes, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his tiny hands. Though he made not a sound, his mother leaned over and whispered to him. The boy nodded, his eyes fixed on Sweete, as if realizing that something grave was occurring before his wide eyes, which were taking in everything. Patting the blankets where the small boy sat, Waits called to the two dogs. Digger and Ghost trotted over and lay down by Jackrabbit, protectively.

  After she had set two small kettles of water over the fire, Waits carried her parfleche of medicinals to a bare spot beside the wounded man. Magpie quietly worked her knife down into the frozen meat, carving off thin hunks she hung from sharpened sticks at the edge of those flames young Flea was feeding with twigs he had broken off of the deadwood dragged into their campsite.

  “You get me something lean back on, Scratch?” Shad asked.

  He pulled over some prairie saddles and a canvas-wrapped bundle, shoving the bundle against Sweete’s back. As the big man slowly eased backward, the saddles kept the bundle from sliding under his weight. Titus knelt beside Waits-by-the-Water at Shad’s right side, opposite Shell Woman.

  “Help her,” Sweete asked. “G’won an’ cut this damn hide off my arm.”

  One by one Scratch sliced through the stiff, narrow strips of frozen hide he had tied around the long section of skin he had bound around the gory wound. All around the edges of the crude bandage Shad’s coat was ragged, torn, and blackened with frozen blood. Stiffened, bloody fragments of his cotton shirtsleeve and the faded red-wool longhandles feathered up around the frozen edges of the buffalo hide.

  When Shell Woman began to open a large, painted rawhide box she had placed on the ground beside her husband, Scratch asked Shad, “She gonna take it off?”

  “Says she won’t, not till it’s soft.”

  “That water she’s heating?”

  Sweete nodded, his face drained of color. “I’m afeared this’s gonna hurt something fierce.”

  “Only way to get her medicine on them cuts is to get that bandage off.”

  “You stopped the bleeding, you beautiful son of a bitch,” Sweete whispered as he looked up with moist eyes. “You kept me from dying.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” he answered reluctantly. “I just done what you asked me—get you to Shell Woman. She’s gotta mend you now.”

  Without a word, Sweete let his head rock back against the bundle and closed his eyes once more. Several minutes later Waits carried the first kettle over to the Cheyenne woman. Then she handed Sweete’s wife a tin cup. From her rawhide box Shell Woman dug out some powders she sprinkled on the surface of the steamy kettle. Next she produced some dried roots, which she rubbed between her palms over the water, fragments and dust from the roots spilling into the kettle as she murmured over and over again a fervent prayer.

  After dipping her bare finger into the hot water, Shell Woman nodded to her husband and scooped out a cupful. Positioning it over the frozen, rock-hard buffalo hide, she continued to whisper her prayers while she began to slowly dribble the hot water onto the stiffened skin. As the tiny, delicate stream of water steamed onto the arm and into Shad’s lap, she closed her eyes.

  At the far side of the fire Flea was making noise as he broke apart limbs and branches to feed the fire that was holding back both the frightening cold and the terrifying darkness. Titus signaled his son to stop, gesturing at the Cheyenne woman. The youngster understood the gravity of the ceremony.

  For what seemed like the longest time as the cold stars swirled overhead and the Seven Sisters traveled at least a fourth of their journey across the sky, Shell Woman poured one hot cup of water after another on the buffalo hide. From time to time she would turn Shadrach’s arm slightly, to moisten another part of the frozen skin. When she had scooped out the last of the water from the first kettle, she asked for the second container and prepared that kettle by crumbling dried roots and leaves into the steamy water, all without any interruption to her monotonous, repeated prayers.

  Eventually Titus heard the scrape of the tin cup across the bottom of that second empty vessel. Shell Woman dropped the cup at her side, leaned back, and closed her eyes as she held her hands just above the soggy buffalo hide, her fingers spread wide. When she finally breathed the last of her prayers and opened her eyes, Shell Woman slipped her fingers under the edges of the moistened hide. Bass winced, knowing this was going to hurt Shadrach. No matter how moist Shell Woman could have gotten the thick, green hide, with all that blood drying, coagulating, and freezing too—it was going to cause some excruciating pain when she ripped the buffalo hair from that jagged spiderweb of deep lacerations.

  Sliding up on his knees right beside his friend, Titus seized Shadrach’s right hand so that Sweete wouldn’t be able to fling the arm at Shell Woman, attempting to prevent his woman from ripping that bloodied, furry bandage from those wounds shrieking in agony. Inch by inch, she pulled back on the soggy hide; every new moment, with each new tug, Bass was prepared for Shad to try jerking away from the hold he had on him. But, surprisingly, the big man did not flinch, not one little twitch, as he and Titus watched in wonder while the last edge of the soggy hide came away in Shell Woman’s hands—
/>   Scratch felt the breath catch in his throat as he stared at what had been a series of messy, gaping, oozy wounds where the blood simply refused to cease flowing while he laid the green hide over them. Instead, what he now bent over to inspect was a series of thick, swollen welts, each long line appearing like a dark, oiled rope—the sort riverboatmen used on the Kentucky flatboats. And protruding from the tangle of dark welts was a gleaming white hair that shimmered in the fire’s light. He glanced at Shadrach, finding as much amazement on Sweete’s face as he knew was on his—then, unable to resist any longer, Titus reached out with a lone finger to brush along one of the welts. It really was fuzzy after all. He yanked the finger back, suddenly afraid. This was strange to the extreme.

  “Where’d all the blood on my arm go?” Shadrach asked. “Feel this here,” Titus instructed.

  “That can’t be buffler hair, can it?” Sweete said as he pulled his finger away, leaning close.

  Scratch himself bent over to inspect the welts again, rubbing a finger across the swollen wounds, sensing the stiffened fuzziness of the hairs sealed within the jagged lacerations. “Cain’t be. The hairs ain’t black, like the hair I tied ’round your arm.”

  “So is it, or isn’t it the buffler hair?”

  With a shake of his head, Bass leaned back and stared into Sweete’s eyes. “Some hair, from somethin’, got closed up in them wounds, slicker’n a nigger could do if’n he’d been trying to knit a wound in just that way.”

  “B-but, you didn’t do that—”

  “No, I didn’t, Shadrach,” he whispered. “I don’t know for sure, but it seem to me the hide done it on its own.”

  Sweete followed Bass’s eyes … down, down to gaze at the soggy buffalo hide spread across Shell Woman’s lap.

  “The damn thing ain’t bloody at all,” Shad gasped quietly with a shudder.

  Titus swallowed with difficulty and croaked, “Lookit the color of that hide, Shadrach.”

  “W-we didn’t shoot no white buffler … that cow we was cutting up when the wolves jumped us weren’t white!”

  Scratch leaned over, brushing his fingers across the wide strip of white fur lying across the Cheyenne woman’s lap. He glanced up at Waits-by-the-Water and found she still held her hand over her mouth in astonishment. As Bass lifted the rectangular strip of soggy white buffalo hide off Shell Woman’s lap, the Cheyenne woman leaned against her husband, silently beginning to sob, her shoulders quaking.

  “You told me to bring you to her, Shad.”

  Sweete cradled his wife against him. “My gut told me that was the only way I’d hold off dying. Didn’t wanna go under out there on my own.”

  “You wasn’t figgering that her medeecin was gonna keep you from dyin’?”

  With a shake of his head, Shad said, “I only knowed my heart’d be stronger if I died with her right there beside me. N-never really knowed for sure she had her mother’s power.”

  “Her mother’s power?” Titus repeated. “What power is that?”

  “Been handed down, mother to daughter, for generations back in them Cheyennes.”

  “What medeecin?”

  “White buffalo—an’ it’s a strong power.”

  “I figger Shell Woman knows she’s just found out she’s got that power handed down to her,” Bass sighed, staring down at those white hairs bristling from the welts of torn tissue and coagulated blood. “I figger she knows her white buffalo medeecin saved your life.”

  * Ride the Moon Down

  FIVE

  A cold, steady rain sluiced off the soggy, shapeless brims of their low-crowned hats as they came to a halt at the crest of the low hill and gazed down at the tall, weathered adobe stockade erected around the American Fur Company’s Fort Laramie.

  “Thar’s Fort William, Shadrach,” Titus said, flicking a droplet of moisture from the end of his cold, red nose.

  “When they put up them mud walls?” Sweete asked as Bass’s eldest son came to a stop on the hill with the packhorses.

  “I dunno,” Titus replied, failing to remember. “Last time I was here, I reckon on how there was timbered walls.”

  “How long’s it been, you been here?”

  “Years. Can’t recollect how many gone by now. You?”

  Sweete wagged his head. “Had to be afore beaver went to hell.”

  “Back near the end—when Bridger was a brigade cap’n for American Fur?”

  “Naw,” Sweete replied. “Bridger always stayed ’bout as far away from here an’ them booshways as a man could keep himself.”

  Bass sniffled, “Likely was some time afore that last ronnyvoo we had us over on the Seedskeedee near Horse Crik.”

  “American Fur squeezed ever’thing outta the mountains,” Shad grumped.

  “Then they kept on squeezin’ so hard they damn near choked ever’thing north from here, clear up to the Englishers’ country.”

  “Only reason they ain’t got a finger in the business south of the Platte is the Bent brothers—” but Sweete caught himself. “I mean, what them brothers did afore Charles was murdered down to Taos.”

  Titus smiled, flashing those crooked teeth the color of pin acorns. “You reckon they got some whiskey to trade, Shadrach?”

  “What the blazes you got to trade for whiskey?”

  “I figger it’s you got some trade goods.”

  A quizzical look crossed Sweete’s face. “I ain’t got no foofaraw to trade. Ain’t worked for Vaskiss or the Bents in many a season … an’ I ain’t laid bait or set a trap in longer’n that—”

  “Can you still arm-wrestle like you done back in them ronnyvoo days?”

  For a moment Sweete gazed down at his right arm, then patted it with his left hand. No longer did he wear the left one in that black bandanna of a sling. “Long as it’s the right arm.”

  “Your other’n, it’ll come, Shad,” Bass reassured. “Don’t you worry—I’ll lay how you’re getting stronger ever’ day. You can still fotch ary a man with that right arm of your’n.”

  “That how you figger we’re gonna get us some whiskey to drink?”

  Titus shrugged. “Don’t pay a man to trap beaver no more. Onliest thing the traders want nowadays is buffler robes. But neither of us got a camp o’ squaws to dress out buffler robes. What’s a ol’ man like me s’posed to do but find a likely young’un with big arms like you to wager whiskey on?”

  “What you got to wager against a cup of hooch?” Shad inquired.

  He thoughtfully scratched at his chin whiskers. “That Cheyenne skinner hangin’ off your belt sure to grab someone’s attention at the trade counter.”

  “My skinner and this sheath Shell Woman worked for me?” he whined in disbelief. “An’ my right arm to boot? You’re just ’bout as slick as year-old snake oil, Titus Bass.”

  “Smooth talker, ain’t I?” And he grinned as the rain splattered his face.

  “Shit. You can’t get away with nothin’, ol’ friend—you’re so bad at lyin’.”

  “Then you’ll buy me a cup of whiskey?” Scratch begged. “Ain’t had none since Dick Green topped off my gourd back down to Bents’ big lodge on the Arkansas.”

  “If’n you’ll put up something of your own against two cups of whiskey, then I reckon I can throw in my arm for a match.”

  “Shell Woman don’t mind you drinking?”

  Turning to peer over at his wife, Sweete ruminated a moment, then said, “I can’t callate as I’ve ever had a drop o’ whiskey since I’ve knowed her.”

  “Nary a cup down to that mud fort on the Arkansas?”

  He wagged his head. “Nope. Not a drop since I been around Shell Woman an’ her people.”

  Titus chuckled softly and said, “Then she ain’t see’d you drunk the way I see’d Shadrach Sweete get in the cups!”

  “Nope. Them days belong to another man now, Scratch.”

  “You was a wild critter, Shadrach,” Bass commented with fond remembrance. “Good damn thing you never got so drunk we’d had to rope you
to a tree till your head dried out. Would’ve took a bunch of us to get you wrassled down and tied up.”

  “Can’t say as I’ve ever see’d you get bad in the cups neither,” Sweete admitted. “So you figger to tear off the top of your head and howl at the moon tonight?”

  “Nope.” And he shook his head dolefully. “Them times is over for me too, lad. I hurt too damn much for days after. Can’t swaller likker like I used to and stay on my feet.”

  “We’re just getting old.”

  “The hell you say! Speak for your own self!” And he shuddered with a chill that was penetrating him to the bone. “I’m getting damned cold sitting out in this rain, water dripping down my ass what’s gone sore on this here soggy saddle—listening to you spoutin’ off ’bout whiskey,” Titus grumbled. “A few swallers’d sure ’nough warm my belly right about now.”

  The fifteen-foot-tall double gate was still much the same as it had been on his last visit to Fort William, but now the arch that extended overhead bore the figure of a horse galloping at full speed, painted red in a primitive design that reminded Scratch of how a horse might be rendered on the side of a Crow or Shoshone lodge. A little distance out, he whistled the dogs close and they all angled away from the mud walls, aiming instead for that flat just below the fort, where the La Ramee Fork dumped itself into the North Platte. Here they would camp close enough to the post to conduct some business, but far enough away that there was little chance of their families being disturbed. After Titus sent Magpie and Flea off through the brush to scratch up what they could of kindling dry enough to hold a flame, he turned to help Shell Woman and Waits-by-the-Water with that small Cheyenne lodge the two women erected only when the weather turned as inhospitable as it had this day.

  “Here, I’ll lend a hand,” Shadrach offered as he grabbed an edge of the buffalo-hide lodge cover.

  “Not with that arm of yours still mending,” Bass scolded.