Wagging his head, Bordeau started to reach out to touch Bass, imploring—but Titus took a step back and wiggled the skinning knife between them. “See this knife? It’s the one I used to cut your friend.”
“Gaston?”
“That’s his name? Gaston. I’ll remember it,” Scratch vowed. “I figger he’ll remember me too.” Wiping the dirt and mud from the tip of the blade across his greasy legging, Titus said, “Should’ve cut his throat an’ scalped him. Them other two grabbed my Magpie, just the same. But I wanted to get my girl and boy away from the sight of your kind quick as I could, Bordeau. ’Sides, what’s Gaston’s scalp to me anyways? I’d only spit on it afore I throwed it down at your feet.”
“Don’t leave me out here without a horse! I beg of you, monsieur!”
“Just stay on the high ground and you’ll keep your boots purty dry.” Scratch passed off the man’s plea and took a step backward. He glanced up at the sky quickly. “Got a half dozen hours of daylight, so you can cover ground if you get after it.”
Bordeau’s face slowly changed from a look of fear to one of undisguised contempt. “From this day—your life is not worth the poor beaver pelt now, monsieur. There are plenty men to look for you too. I make sure they look for you.”
“Only way you do that is keep yourself alive, Bordeau.” He turned away to take up the reins of his horse. “None of your kind ever belonged out here … but I’ll bet one day your kind will run all over this country, stinkin’ it up—”
“The company will not forget this murder!”
“Your company be damned!” Titus snapped as he stuffed his muddy moccasin in the cottonwood stirrup and raised himself into the saddle.
Shaking his muddy fist at the old trapper, Bordeau shrieked, “You do not do this to the American Fur Company!”
Pulling his horse around, Titus took a moment to watch Shad start away with the others as Flea herded their pack animals at the rear of the march.
“Your company put its murderin’ hands around the beaver trade—choking the breath an’ blood out of my way of life, makes me wanna put my hands around your throat an’ choke it outta you.”
Bordeau laid a hand at his throat. “You nevair get away with what you do to me!”
Suddenly Bass kicked his horse in its ribs, galloping back across those few yards toward the trader. Bordeau shrank backward, putting both arms up and crossing them over his face protectively. Wrenching back on the reins, Scratch stopped just a yard short of the Frenchman. He leaned over in the saddle, looming over Bordeau.
“Maybe your kind has gone and kill’t most ever’thing I hold dear, you parley-voo windbag,” he growled as he straightened in the saddle once more and nudged his horse around in a half circle. “But I’ll be damned if I let your kind kill me!”
Scratch didn’t rein up and look back at Bordeau until he had reached the top of a low rise. The trader was still standing there, unmoved, as if he intended to watch the old mountain man ride away until he finally disappeared from sight. But the moment Bordeau saw the horseman stop and turn around, he scooted into the sage and crouched as if he could actually hide himself among that skimpy brush.
“I hope that scared fool won’t come follering us,” Titus sighed. “Maybeso he does, he’ll find out soon enough there’s no way he’s gonna keep up on foot—not him wearin’ them fancy St. Louie boots of his.”
The sun was out for three more days before the next soaking storm forced them to huddle out of the wind in the lee of a ridge for a night and all of the following day. When it was plain that the sun would be rising into a cloudless sky the next morning, Bass and Shadrach got everyone up early and had Magpie cook them all a big breakfast while Waits and Shell Woman tore down the lodge and packed the travois. When he was given the word, Flea tugged on the lead rope tied around the neck of the friendly lead mare and started their extra horses toward the next wide gap, plodding ever westward.
“That the Winds?” Sweete asked late that afternoon, pointing at the jagged line of white-capped purple lying low along the horizon far to the north-northwest of them.
“Southern Pass be a long, long ride from here, that’s for sure,” Scratch said. Then he asked, “How long it been since you was up there in that country?”
“Back when ronnyvooz died,” Shad admitted. “How many winters is that?”
“I cipher it’s goin’ on seven, Shadrach.”
Sweete chuckled, “So I can figger you know the way you’re leadin’ us west?”
“I only tromped over parts of this,” he confessed. “See’d other parts of it from on high.”
It was long before Sweete asked, “Maybe we should’ve took the old trail by the Platte to the Sweetwater, across the pass and down to the Sandy.”
“Helluva long ways to get to Black’s Fork. I’ll lay we’ll be at Bridger’s back door afore Bordeau ever walks back into Fort William.”
The grin disappeared from the tall man’s face. “You know you cain’t ever show your face on that side of the mountains again, Scratch.”
Bass pursed his lips thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “I can’t think of anything ever gonna pull me back to that side of the mountains anyway, Shadrach.”
“I’ll go back, eventual’,” Sweete admitted.
“You will?”
“The woman—she’s got family,” Shad explained. “That means them young’uns got family down on the plains.”
“But that’s south of Fort William,” Titus assured him. “You won’t have to go nowhere near that post when you take Shell Woman back to see her kin down toward Bents’ big lodge on the Arkansas.”
Wagging his head slightly, Sweete said, “There I was—happy as a sow bug under a buffler chip, living the life of a Cheyenne warrior … and you have to come along an’ pull me away for a long ride right into a mess o’ trouble.”
With a snort, Bass said, “Man like you only gonna waste away in the life of a Cheyenne warrior, Shadrach! Slowly go crazy bein’ a layabout with nothin’ to do an’ nowhere to go.”
“I go huntin’,” Shad argued, bristling. “And I been on a few raids for Ute horses.”
“You got lazy an’ soft, way you been livin’ the last few years, child.”
They burst out laughing together, loud enough it made both women turn and gaze back at them a moment before the wives looked at one another in that way women do when men act in some new and bewildering way.
“Man needs to get out, breathe the air,” Titus explained. “See some new country, a far land, just like the ol’ days, Shadrach.”
Sweete drew in a long, deep breath of the chill air as some sage grouse whirred away from their path. “How—how long you figger can a man hold on to the old days, Scratch?”
He thought for but a moment, then reflected, “Just as long as that man dares to hold on, my friend. Long as he dares to hold on.”
SEVEN
A long and muddy spring greened the prairie, short and hardy shoots uplifting beneath the aching blue of a sky that went on and on across those days while their tiny group plodded west through the stark and barren Red Desert so briefly aflower with a palette of heady color. The water in the streams and creeklets was poor for many days, laced with bitter salts, forcing them to search out hidden, bubbling springs or even fields of boulders where rain might be trapped in tiny pools. Most mornings the women found a thin crust of ice coating what water they had managed to collect in their brass kettles—the only sign they had begun their climb over the Continental Divide in crossing this austere and desolate stretch of country.
Eventually they reached the banks of the fabled Green River, lying by for two days while the horses ate their fill of the new short-grass and everyone soaked in those cold, legendary waters. After crossing the river, they struck west-northwest, following Black’s Fork as it meandered through a country of red and yellow bluffs, and spent the next night where Ham’s Fork poured in, camping in that verdant V of meadow formed by those two tributaries of the Gre
en, here where the free men and fur brigades had gathered to celebrate the height of summer, eighteen and thirty-four.
While supper bubbled in the kettles that twilight at the fire, Titus called his long-legged daughter to come sit upon his knee.
“I grow so tall now, Popo,” she protested in English, standing before him. “Magpie not fit so good now.”
“You’ll always fit on your father’s knee,” he scolded as he patted his thigh again. “Come sit, girl.”
Waits-by-the-Water got to her feet at the far side of the fire, shifted her new shawl about her shoulders, and said, “Sit, because your father wants to tell you a story.”
“I listen too?” Flea asked, scratching Digger’s head. The dog had his muzzle laid on the boy’s leg.
He nodded at the youngster. “I think it’s good you listen to my story about Magpie.”
She leaned back a little against her father’s arm so she could gaze at her father’s wrinkled face. “A story about me?”
“Yes, daughter. You got your name right here at this place.”
Quickly peering down at the ground Magpie asked, “This spot?”
“Yonder, just across the river,” he explained and pointed. “Your mother and me, we were camped on upstream some. This here is named Black’s Fork.”
“Color of war, Popo?” Flea inquired.
“Black is the color of war—but I figger it was given a man’s name, son. Not for war.”
As Ghost followed her, Waits stepped around the edge of the fire pit, one hand on a hip and the other clutching a brass ladle. “This place, long ago, your father promise he teach you and me speak his white man talk, teach us together.”
For a moment, Titus gazed up at Shadrach, who stood nearby. “Near as I recollect, ronnyvoo of thirty-four was the last doin’s where I got likkered on John Barleycorn something bad. Paid heavy for it too. But it were a time I drunk my fill with a old friend I wasn’t ever to see again.”
“He a free man, or skin trapper like me?” Sweete asked.
“Neither. English. Jarrell Thornbrugh—a real John Bull of a Englisher.”
“Hudson’s Bay man?”
“By damn if he wasn’t” Titus replied, growing wistful. “Last time I laid eyes on him was right here in this valley. That’s back to a time when them Britishers was dispatchin’ a small brigade out to our ronnyvoo, for to keep a eye on us Americans. But, I never see’d Jarrell after thirty-four.”
Flea asked, “He not come back? Not to mountains?”
His eyes landed on his son sitting nearby. “No. Jarrell died two years arter I last saw him. Others said he was took by some croup-sick or the ague. That’s a wet and muggy country out there. I went, once. Long ago it was. This air, dry the way it is, keeps a man safe from the ague.” He lowered his eyes and wagged his head. “Jarrell was a better man than to die in bed. Such is for cowards and sick ol’ men—to die in bed. A good man like him, a brave warrior never lives forever. Only the rocks and sky live long, children. Only the rocks and sky.”
“Tell story of Magpie’s name,” Flea asked as he sashayed up beside his father’s vacant knee and plopped on the ground at Bass’s feet.
“Well, now—that’s where I was headin’ in the first place.” Scratch cleared his throat, remembering a precious and bygone heartbeat of time. “That summer night it seemed like the whole of the world held its breath, just for my baby girl.”
He went on to tell Magpie how it was that ever since they had arrived at that long-ago rendezvous of the white traders and fur trappers, the infant had taken to chattering more with every day—a happy, cheerful babble. “And for your mother, it was not an easy day to wait.”
“Wait?” Magpie asked.
“To learn your name,” he answered, winking at his wife. “She’s never been a patient sort, young’uns.”
“I was patient to wait for you,” she protested from across the fire.
“Damn glad you did.” Then he looked back into his daughter’s eyes, close as they were to his, and magnetically intent upon his every word now. “I sat by a fire, just like this’un, Magpie. Had you on my lap, just like I got you sitting right now. With the Apsaluuke, you know that menfolk are to name their young’uns, right?”
She nodded eagerly. “A name is a special gift, yes.”
“Your mother’d been after me for some time to give our first child a name.”
Magpie nodded. “Long time ago I was born in Mateo’s lodge in Ta-house.”
“So that evening I tol’t your mother you’d allays had a name.”
“Magpie was always mine?”
“Only took me a while to figure it out, daughter,” he admitted with a shrug. “The Creator—the Grandfather Above your mother’s people call First Maker—He was waiting for us to find out what name He’d already give you.”
Confusion crossed her face. “So my Popo did not name me?”
“I s’pose I did, but I had some help from First Maker too, because I got it wrong three times.”
“Three names you tried to give her?” Flea inquired as Shell Woman handed her young son to an enthralled Shadrach, who sat spellbound, listening to the story with the youngster.
“First I thought your name was Little Red Calf,” Titus explained. “You was just like a li’l buffler calf when they’re first born—all red and wrinkled up. But, wasn’t long an’ you changed—wasn’t red no more. So my mind come up with Spring Calf Woman, since you was born in the spring.”
Magpie’s eyes squinted up a bit. “But in the spring, calves turn yellow.”
“That’s right—because your hair ain’t rightly black like your mother’s.”
She lifted a handful of her own to inspect it.
“I have a sister got yellow hair,” Titus continued. “Yellow as the bright sun. One of my brothers too. You won’t never have yellow hair like them, but I did once’t—an’ I give you a little of that color afore you was born.”
“But Magpie never had no yellow hair,” Shad pressed, “so, what’d you name her for a third go at it?”
“Cricket,” he said in English. “For all them happy sounds she made as a baby … but by the time we got here to ronnyvoo, I had me a strong feeling that wasn’t the name either. I was starting to get worrisome: three tries an’ I’d got it wrong all those times.”
“Then Grandfather Above told you?” Magpie said, tugging gently on the front of his faded calico shirt.
“Said to name you Magpie. ’Cause you loved to talk, even before we could understand your talk. ’Nother thing He tol’t me was your mother could smoke with me that night we called you Magpie for the first time.”
“Women never smoke,” Flea argued, his young face gray with seriousness.
“Your mother belonged to our lodge, son. I am leader of that lodge—the coyote band. I told her she could smoke to pray for our first young’un.”
“You smoke and pray for me too?” the boy asked, turning to his mother.
“We have done the same for you and Jackrabbit,” she answered in Crow. “Go get your little brother before he gets too close to the riverbank.”
Scrambling up as he grumbled in complaint, Flea took after the fleet-footed Jackrabbit. That’s when Scratch took an opportunity to whisper to his daughter.
“You wanted to smoke my pipe the night we named you.”
She grinned at that. “So you let me smoke soon, like my mother?”
“No,” he shook his head. “Not for women like it is for men. That smoke your mother had for each of her young’uns was real holy.”
“I do not know this word, holy.”
In Crow Bass explained, “Do you understand sacred?”
“Yes, now I see the meaning.”
“You was all arms and legs that night, wriggling and squealing, when we took off all your clothes—so you was naked as the day you was born. Then I held you up to the sky, so First Maker could get Him a real good look at the beautiful creature He’d made through your mother an’ me.”
“Will this be my name for all time?”
He hugged her a little more tightly. “Your mother an’ me have you with us for only a short time. One day, you’ll belong to another—”
“But I don’t wanna leave you!” she sobbed in Crow against his chest.
Rubbing the first spill of tears from a cheek, Scratch said, “One day soon you will be ready to leave us, and go with a man. The two of you gonna make a family of your own. You won’t be with our family no more.”
“No, Popo! I don’t want to leave!”
“Daughter,” he said, his throat clogged with emotion, “it is the way of the Creator. You’re with us for just a short while, riding the trails we take. Then comes a season an’ you’ll go off on your own trail. A time when we both will cry for your leavin’.”
“I don’t want that for a long, long time,” the girl sobbed, pressing her face into the hollow of his neck.
“An’ one day, a long, long time from now—the First Maker will call you back to be with Him again, Magpie. He’ll lift your spirit back up there with all the rest of them stars so you can be with Him again—just like you was afore you come to live with us for a little while.”
As Magpie turned her damp face upward to look at the sky, Titus glanced at his wife, finding her smiling at him, just as she had that night thirteen summers before, her cheeks glistening with moisture that spilled from her radiant black-cherry eyes. Just the way she had cried when they had given their daughter her name here beneath these same stars, beside these same waters. He was reminded how much had happened to him, happened to them all, in those intervening seasons. Then he was struck with how this place had remained unchanged—these bluffs and the rising half-moon, the rocks and the water. It all was timeless, perhaps infinite, while he himself was a mere mortal who came, and lived, then passed on in the mere blink of an eye compared to the everlasting earth and sky.
“Magpie.” The girl whispered her own name, gazing again at her father’s teary eyes.
He turned to his daughter, seeing how Magpie’s cheeks were completely streaked with riyulets of tears, her eyes pooling like her mother’s. “Yes, Magpie,” he repeated. “The li’l talking one who came to stay with her mother an’ me for a while.”
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