Wind Walker

by Terry C. Johnston

Wagging his head, Jim confessed, “I don’t think I understand any of this—”

  “We ain’t s’posed to!” Titus said with glee. “Don’t you see? That’s the way it is with these here Injuns. They get their minds around what they can understand an’ they don’t let the rest of it fret ’em at all. It’s the way of things out here in these mountains.”

  “How’s that?”

  Leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, Bass whispered, “Injuns say I just gotta quit worryin’ ’bout ever’thing I don’t understand.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s what I ain’t meant to understand … till ever’thing is showed me an’ the answers is given.”

  “When’s that gonna happen?”

  Titus explained, “Waits told me it’s when a warrior’s spirit takes off from his body.”

  “When he dies?”

  Nodding, Scratch said, “I s’pose that’s it, dead center, Gabe. When a warrior’s spirit is free of his body … we’ll get all the answers.”

  “Answers for things like what happened to heal Shadrach’s arm?” Jim asked. “Answers for why Lucas was took by a rattler?”

  He swallowed hard on that lump in his throat. “Makes this here child feel a lot better just knowin’ he’ll unnerstand all the questions one of these days, Gabe. One of these days … eventual’.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  This part of the day always smelled the very best. Here when it grew light enough for him to stir and muck about, but still well before sunup. The air had a special quality to it as the night was just beginning to relent and give itself to the day. These breathless moments were undeniably the best, no matter what season it was.

  In spring, you could drink it in deep and smell the fresh, full-bodied, fertile readiness of the earth about to renew itself. And in summer this was the last of those cool moments before the sun began to radiate down from the sky, heat baking back up from the earth in waves of oppressive torture. Now in late autumn the air captured a tang, that aroma of things dying lifting from the ground where leaves and plants lay moldering, where little creatures dug themselves in for a long nap. Come winter, those creatures meant to sleep would not stir, while those meant to suffer and die would indeed endure and withstand, or die. Come winter in this far north land, a time when life could be decided quickly, brutally—when survival hung by a slender thread—each new terrible morning could taste as sweet as winesap on his tongue, at the back of his throat. The long, black night of winter would eventually leave, like a man reluctant to abandon his lover’s bed, unwilling to give itself over to the light of day, to the warmth of those brief hours when about all a man could do was to prepare for the coming of the next long winter’s night.

  Autumn mornings in this far country north of the Yellowstone smelled the best. This was the time of year when matters of life and death were held in the balance, when it was decided what would live on and what would not see the coming of another spring. Mornings cold, hoarfrost coating most everything with a layer of icy death, breathsmoke wreathed around his head as he was always the first to stir. But by afternoon the sun had melted away the frost, steam drifted up from the thawing ground, and a man actually began to believe that the finality of winter had been put off for one more day.

  Autumn in the north was what he had longed for so when they set off on their hot march north from Fort Bridger, back when Gabe’s calendar had confirmed September was drawing to a close.

  “Won’t be no more trains coming through,” Bridger said to Bass one afternoon some two weeks following their return to his post on Black’s Fork.

  Scratch had wiped the sweat from his eyes and stared west a moment before he said, “Any pilgrims show up now, like to be caught by snow in the mountains.”

  “You got a itch to tramp, this here’s the time to scratch it good.”

  Turning to gaze at Bridger, Titus had explained, “I’ll lay as I been here in one place long enough, Gabe.”

  “Reckon that’s so.” Jim sighed. “Time was, I kept movin’ too. Been here four years now. Don’t figger I got any reason to move on now, the way I did when I was younger.”

  “Likely I ain’t growed out of it like you done,” Bass responded. “Not ready to call one place my home. For while longer, my home gonna stay where my woman an’ me set up camp for the night, or for the winter.”

  “Where you fixin’ to stay out the robe season?”

  “Gotta be back in Crow country afore the land goes hard, Jim,” he had admitted. “We got us that young’un on the way.”

  Bridger had stood and held out his hand. “I can put some store credit on the books for you … or you can take out your wages afore you go.”

  “I’ll do some of both,” he had declared. “The young’uns deserve some new pretties, an’ we ought’n have some presents to give out when I take this here family north back to their relations.”

  He knew the way well enough that with a three-quarter moon Bass decided they would leave the following day at dusk instead of with the coming of dawn. Travel out those short hours of the late-summer night, pressing on into mid-morning while the heat began to rise again from the earth. Only then finding shade in those leafy trees bordering Ham’s Fork, later the Sandy, then the Sweetwater, and on to the Popo Agie. Climb north to the Wind River as they watched for any sign at the curve of the earth ahead: dust rising from a village on the move, or smoke from those who had planted their camp in some oxbow of a pleasant stream. Come every sunrise as he studied the distance for a place to spend out the heat of the day, Titus Bass also surveyed the land for some sign that they had located Yellow Belly’s Crow. But chances were better than good that the bands were north of the Yellowstone for now. This was the time of the year the camp was moving, when the Crow went in search of the herds in earnest, making the kills and drying the meat against the deep snows and everlasting cold so hard the trees would boom like those cannons the American Fur Company kept atop the walls of its fur posts. Here in the last days of Indian summer the Crow would be hunting with a missionary zeal before the beasts began turning south with that biological imperative buried in their marrow eons before the first man ever raised his first stone-tipped arrow, flung his first stone-tipped spear at the shaggy creatures. Ages ago when winter and the wolf were the only killers.

  Hot as it had been, winter was no more than a fond hope now.

  As if summer would never release its grip on the central mountains, the springs and creeks had shrunk like alum thrown on a green hide—little more than sparse, cool trickles—while the grass for the animals had withered and was harder to find day by day, the talc-fine dust rising from each hoof and travois pole, coating the inside of mouth and nose, burning the eyes with the sting of alkali, making him yearn all the more for the high places where a man found comfort and took sanctuary, no matter how steamy it became down below.

  When they stopped on a nearby hill for a look into the narrow valley, he found no one camped near the colorful cones and terraces of the hot springs. The Shoshone must be ranging far to the east on the other side of the Bighorn Mountains in search of the herds of buffalo and antelope. For days now he had not spotted any sign of them, much less stumbling across a Snake village in one of their usual haunts in that Wind River country.

  “This will be a good place to stay for two nights while I go hunting with Flea,” he told Waits-by-the-Water late that morning.

  As she slipped to the ground, Waits arched her spine a little, a flat hand pressed at the small of her back. “Two nights to rest here. That will do my bones good.”

  “Your back hurts from the long rides we’ve made?”

  “This new child of yours,” Waits groaned as she slowly slid out of the saddle, “he is not a good rider like the rest of your children were.”

  Legging off his horse, Titus hurried to her, putting his arm around her shoulder and bringing up her chin so he could gaze into her eyes. “We’ll stay here till you’re rested and ready to go on.”

&nb
sp; “Should we pitch the lodge?” she asked. “What of a storm?”

  “Magpie and Flea can help me,” he offered. He studied her belly, how she had really begun to show. “You rest over there in the shade for now.”

  Gazing at him with a grin, she said, “I am not a helpless baby, Ti-tuzz. I can still do everything I have always done when I carried a child in my belly.”

  “Enough, woman,” he chided her. “Jackrabbit, take your mother with you over there to the shade.” Then he turned back to his wife, saying, “I’ll let you put everything away when we have the lodge staked down for you. Now go sit with the boy.”

  By the time they had the cover pinned against the poles, the air had grown warm—especially when the breeze gasped and died. So they could avoid the strong sulfurous odors of the gurgling springs, he had made camp upwind of the steamy pools, where shallow pools of hot water collected on a series of terraces. On downwind from them stood a tall cone composed entirely of minerals deposited over the eons by a single spewing spring, one microscopic layer after another. As he began to drag the baggage off the packhorses, Scratch had Magpie and Flea roll up the bottom of the lodge cover so the light breeze could move through the shady lodge.

  “Now it’s time to take the horses to the crik,” he instructed his eldest son. “Water them good, much as they wanna drink. We don’t need to worry ’bout them gettin’ too much because we’ll be stayin’ put for two nights.”

  “Do you want me to picket the horses when I am done watering them?” he asked. “Or, do you want me to let them wander?”

  “They should be awright on their own,” Titus replied. “Let ’em find the grass they want to eat by themselves.”

  What plants grew in this narrow valley not only tasted good but were highly nutritious, fed by the mineral-rich waters beneath the soil. It was clear to see from the many tracks and well-used trails crisscrossing their camping ground that the nourishing and flavorful vegetation attracted both deer and antelope to this valley too. As Flea moved off, herding the horses before him, Scratch considered taking the boy hunting at first light the next morning, when the game was moving out of their beds and down toward water. Yes, this would be a good place to lay over for a few days, he thought as he dropped to the grass in a patch of shade near the lodge, watching Waits and Magpie dragging their few belongings through the lodge door.

  “Jackrabbit! Come over here to your father!” he called out in Crow.

  The boy clambered into his lap and sat.

  “You stay here with me,” he told his son. “Where you won’t be in the way of those women. Always best for a man to stand back and stay completely out of the way when a woman is at work. This is a good lesson for a boy to learn.”

  As Jackrabbit slid off his father’s lap and laid his head down on Titus’s thigh, Scratch leaned back against a tree and closed his eyes.

  Here at the springs they were more than halfway to the Yellowstone from Bridger’s post. They could afford to rest here before they marched on to find Yellow Belly’s Crow, who wouldn’t cross the Yellowstone and start south until the weather began to cool. Until then, the hunting bands would stay north, perhaps as far away as the Judith or the Musselshell, on the prowl for buffalo and wary of the Blackfoot. Time enough to be pushing on before the cold arrived. For now the second summer was hanging on—

  “Popo!” Flea called excitedly as he rode up on the bare back of his claybank.

  Titus immediately came out of his sleep, raising Jackrabbit’s head as he started to slip out from under the small boy. Magpie and Waits sat in the shade of the lodge cover, watching. “Trouble?” he asked.

  Flea watched his father reach around for the rifle he had propped against the tree. “No trouble … I think.”

  “What did you wake me up for?” He blinked as he stepped into the intense sunlight.

  “Someone is staying near the creek.”

  Alarm troubled his belly. “Indian?”

  His head bobbed. “But they have no lodge. Only a small shelter made of branches and blankets.”

  “How many?” he asked as he came to his son’s knee. A branch-and-blanket shelter sounded like a war lodge, a horse-stealing party on its way into enemy country.

  “I don’t think there are many of them. I only saw three horses grazing nearby.”

  “Did anyone see you?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t think so, but I’m not sure.”

  “How did you find this shelter?”

  He patted the claybank beneath him. “I heard a horse whistle. My pony heard it too and asked me if we should go see. I thought we should go because we didn’t know anyone else was camped close to us.”

  “You were careful?” he asked, then whistled low for the dogs. “Did you see if you were followed?”

  Flea nodded. “I watched my back trail carefully.”

  “Where is this shelter and the three horses?”

  Turning to point as the two dogs bounded out of the brush, the boy said, “Over that low ridge, where the stream makes a slow circle at the base of the hill.”

  “Our horses are safe?”

  “Yes, Popo. I brought them back from the water and put them out to graze on the other side of that willow.”

  He looked downstream at the bottom of the hill where the sun glared brightly on the rustling leaves. “I see them now. Good. Magpie?”

  She poked her head from the lodge. “You need me?”

  “Come help me tie up the dogs so they will stay here with you and your mother.”

  When Ghost and Digger were secured at the ends of their tethers, and he had knotted a bandanna around each muzzle to keep them quiet, Scratch turned to his son and asked, “Flea, can you take me to look at this shelter you found?”

  “Come up with me and I will take you.” The boy patted the back of his horse.

  Titus retrieved two pistols and stuffed them in his belt before he handed his son the rifle, then bounded onto the rear flanks of the claybank pony. Once he had scooted forward against the boy, Scratch took back his rifle. He looped his left arm around Flea’s waist and said, “Let’s go see who these strangers are.”

  They left the claybank tied in a clump of alder, then scrambled up the side of the hill at an angle. Scratch followed his boy to just below the top, then they both dropped to their bellies and crawled on up to the crest. At the top he peered down at the narrow creek, unable to find the shelter at first. Eventually he spotted a patch of what looked to be greasy, smoke-darkened canvas in the midst of a large stand of eight-foot-tall willow.

  “Where are the three horses?” he whispered.

  “On the other side,” Flea said. “You come around the hill, that way, and you see them.”

  “Tied up?”

  He nodded. “Long ropes.”

  “Saddles?”

  This time Flea shook his head. “I saw no saddles. White man or Indian.”

  “But you saw the horses, son. What tribe are these strangers?”

  “Don’t know, Popo.”

  “Any weapons hanging outside?” he asked. “Shield or medicine bundle?”

  “No. I saw nothing.” He grew thoughtful a moment, then told his father, “It is a poor camp, no signs of wealth. Maybe we leave them alone, and they won’t bother us too.”

  “Can’t take that chance, Rea. With us camped just over the hill at the springs, these strangers are too close. Best to know who your neighbors are.”

  Titus slid backward, then rolled onto his hip and sat up, pulling the first pistol from his belt. Handing it to the boy, he said, “Here. You know how to use this if you need to?”

  “I remember.”

  “Good. I want you at my back when we walk in there.”

  When they reached the bank of the narrow creek opposite the shelter, Bass saw how much thought had gone into placing the structure where it was all but concealed, except from straight on. It had all the signs of an old camp: footpaths tracking upstream and down, all the grass ar
ound the stand of willow trampled by moccasins if not hooves, and a small portion of the sharp cutbank worn down by the strangers as they knelt while dipping water from the stream. He was certain this wasn’t a war lodge—a shelter hastily constructed for one night’s sleep as a war party walked or rode deep into enemy country. No, from the signs of things, this trio of strangers had been here for some time and didn’t appear to be in a rush to leave.

  “We’ll wait here and see how many are inside,” he whispered to the boy. “If all three strangers are here, I will need to send you back for your bow. But if only one of them sleeps inside, we are in no danger with our three guns.”

  “We just wait?”

  He looked at his son. “Patience is something good for all young men to learn.”

  Minutes later Flea whispered close to his father’s ear, “Were you very different from me when you were my age?”

  Grinning, he tousled his son’s long, black hair and said, “Boys are the same, no matter where they grow up, no matter if they Crow like you, or a white boy like I was.”

  “Sometimes I think that I will never grow up to be as good a man as you,” Flea confessed.

  “That’s where you are wrong,” he said in a hush, deeply touched by the honor in his son’s words.

  In exasperation, the boy said, “But you know all these things that I don’t think I ever will know.”

  “I suppose I make you feel that way because I try to teach you all that I have learned—to help you understand all those things I did not understand. I want to give you my hand in growing into a man, the help that I did not have. So, I am sorry if I have not been a good and gentle father to you. Sorry if I tell you that you should learn patience … then I am not patient with you myself.”

  “You have been a very good father,” Flea responded, his eyes filled with respect. “Maybe there are times when it is hard to be my father.”

  Laying his hand on the boy’s shoulder, Titus whispered, “I will try better to remember that there are times it is difficult to be my son—”

  “Look!” Flea whispered harshly.