Wind Walker

by Terry C. Johnston

  A shadowy form appeared at the shelter’s low doorway, bent at the waist and knees, as the stranger stepped into a patch of shade and stood. A woman!

  She straightened and shook her clothes around her—a long leather skirt that fell just below her knees and an ill-fitting cloth shirt once of a bright calico pattern, but now so crusted with grime and fire soot that it was hard for Titus to make out what color it had ever been. She wore no moccasins, her feet coated with a thick layer of ground-in dirt. She pushed back her unkempt hair and began to brush at it with a porcupine tail that had its quills clipped short, slowly and painfully yanking at the ratty knots, beginning to shake loose the bits of grass and ash that had collected there. She was not a young thing, he could see. Her hair hung well flecked with the snows of something more than forty winters, and her breasts sagged with not only the pull of age but the mouths of babes who had suckled at them what had to be a lifetime ago.

  Perhaps there was a child inside that shelter; if not a child, then a youngster not quite become an adult—

  A second figure stepped from the dark interior and emerged clumsily, one hand clutching onto the left side of the shelter to steady himself. Barechested, his legs naked as well, and not wearing any moccasins, the man tugged at his long breechclout, straightening it on the narrow strap of leather tied around his waist, then adjusting his manhood beneath the front fold of what had once been a bright red piece of trader’s wool. The bright colors of selvage at the edges of the breechclout were faded, frayed, and almost indistinguishable with soot and filth. He rubbed the heels of both palms into his eyes, then spread his fingers apart to push back what unruly sprigs of his graying hair had refused to stay bound within his long braids also dusted with flecks of dried grass.

  “Where is the third one?” Flea asked. “Inside?”

  “Wait, and we will see.”

  The woman walked to the edge of the bushes, past the ground where the three horses raised their heads and followed her toward the hillside. There she yanked up the bottom of her short skirt, one side after another, raising it to her hips, then squatted and moistened the ground, unaware of the father and son across that narrow ribbon of water. When she stood, shifting the skirt back around her legs, and started back to the shelter, the three horses remained near the bottom of the hill to crop at the grass.

  Quietly lifting the flap to his shooting pouch, Bass pulled out the spyglass and snapped out its three sections. He quickly looked over those three animals, inspecting their muzzles, manes, backs, and tails. These were not the proud possessions of a warrior: groomed, painted, a tail bound up for battle. All three showed their age, and two of them clearly had healing sores on their backs from an ill-fitting saddle. Slowly he dragged the spyglass across to his left, hoping to get himself a better look at these two aging and disheveled strangers.

  He stopped first on the woman as she took down from a tree branch two small carcasses he had not noticed hanging there before. Rabbits; gutted, but unskinned. Plopping them beside a lifeless fire pit, she bent over the game and picked up a small knife, using it to slowly work the hide off the meat. As she squatted over those rabbits, Scratch studied her—unable to make out what tribe she was from her manner of dress or decorations. But he could only assume these two had to be Shoshone. This was, after all, near the northern border of Snake country, but close to the southern extent of Crow land as well. Still, in the absence of lodge symbols, pony paintings, or distinguishable hairstyles, Titus could only guess the couple had to be Shoshone.

  When he inched the spyglass on to the left and found the man settling onto the trampled grass, Bass twisted the sections of the tube together until he brought the stranger’s face into sharper focus. The man leaned back on his elbows in the shade and closed his eyes as if relishing that particular moment. He spoke to the woman without looking at her or opening his eyes. The sound of his voice drifted across the creek to the rocks and willow where Bass and Flea lay in hiding, pricking a remembrance, perhaps even a warning, at the top of Scratch’s spine, there at the base of his skull. He held the spyglass as steady as he could, concentrating on that aging face. It had been so long, so very long, that he could not be certain … because the last time he had laid eyes on the man was more than—how many now? More than fourteen winters ago. How the years had taken a toll on the old warrior.

  “I know him,” Titus whispered, not taking the spyglass from his right eye.

  “The man?” Flea asked.

  As Scratch watched him through the spyglass, the man’s eyes suddenly popped open and he gazed intently across the narrow creek, slowly turning his head as he studied the base of the hill where Bass and his son lay in hiding. It was clear the warrior had heard something of the unseen spies. He spoke to the woman, and she looked up, peering across the creek too as she wearily got to her feet. The man slid his legs under him and stood, backing toward the shelter as the woman hurried behind him, quickly ducking through the low opening. In a moment her arm appeared again, handing out an old trade gun to the man. Just before Bass took the spyglass from his eye, he saw how poor a weapon the firearm was—repaired with rawhide wraps at both the wrist right behind the lock, and again along the forestock, just in front of the rear sight. Both crude repairs clearly showing signs of age.

  Titus put his lips to Flea’s ear and whispered, “Stay down until I tell you to show yourself.”

  “Where is the third one?” asked the boy. “Should I watch for him?”

  Sliding his knees under him, Bass said, “I don’t think there is a third stranger. Just that old woman and a man who was once an old friend. One who became an old enemy long ago.”

  As he stood, Scratch raised his rifle in the air, held high at the end of his arm. He wasn’t certain when he shouted across the narrow creek if he had remembered the smattering of the Snake tongue he had learned that winter he was healing, after the Arapaho had ambushed him and taken part of his scalp. Maybe enough of what he said would make sense to the old man who readied that ancient trade gun to shoot and to the woman who crawled out of the shelter with a brace of horse pistols.

  “I mean no harm!” he hurled his voice, waiting for the low echo to end. “We are old friends.”

  “Who is this claiming we are old friends?”

  Cautiously, he inched into the open, still holding the rifle in the air. “See this? I cannot shoot this weapon at you.”

  “Answer my question: Who are you?”

  “Look at me and tell me you don’t remember,” he urged the warrior. “I know you are called Slays in the Night.”

  That seemed to stun the Indian a moment. Eventually he said, “Who knows my old name from so many winters ago?”

  “Titus Bass!”

  The man appeared to work that over in his mind the way a wolf bitch would work round and round making a bed for herself when it came time to birth her pups. Finally he demanded, “Let me see more of you!”

  Scratch slowly lowered his rifle and moved more to his left, coming into the open, knowing he was putting faith in this old friend made into an old enemy from so long ago. It was faith and nothing more, because he had no solid reason to trust Slays in the Night. Nothing more than the sense of it in his gut that he could give the warrior this benefit of the doubt.

  Even though the Shoshone did not lower his weapon, the tone of his voice was no longer strident. The way it had sounded when he cursed Titus Bass that morning in Brown’s Park.* And now he spoke in a stuttered English, “You not dead, Titus Bass?”

  “You learned to talk some American, Slays in the Night?” he asked as he lowered the butt of his rifle to the ground and crossed his wrists over the muzzle, staring across the stream.

  “Some little, yes.”

  “Last time I see’d you—said you was gonna kill me next time you laid eyes on me,” Titus declared. “You still fixed on killin’ me?”

  He mulled on those foreign words a few moments, then looked down at his old trade gun a heartbeat before he lowered it,
suspending it in his hand at the end of his arm. “No. I am too tired, too old, kill you now. Maybe long winters ago. Too tired now kill Titus Bass.”

  As he finished speaking English, the old woman said something to him in low tones and he turned slightly toward her to mumble.

  Seeing how she lowered her pistols and turned for the doorway, Titus asked, “Is that your wife? The woman who makes the good-tastin’ pemeecan?”

  Shaking his head sadly, Slays in the Night explained, “No. Not this woman. Old wife now … gone. Other wife, she …” and then he grew frustrated that he could not explain in English. Speaking Shoshone instead, he said, “That wife so many summers ago, she left Slays in the Night. That’s not really right. It is better to say that my old wife stayed with our people when Slays in the Night left the village for the war trail.”

  “In all those years,” Bass inquired in Shoshone, “you never gone back to your people?”

  “I couldn’t,” he confessed. “The headmen drove me away and did not allow me to return … so my old wife stayed with her relations. She no longer wanted to be with me. She did not come with her husband.”

  Bass gradually put the words together, at least enough of them to understand what the warrior had spoken to him in Shoshone.

  “Do you still ride the war trail?” Titus inquired.

  Slays in the Night snorted sadly. “Look around at what I have, Titus Bass,” he said in his native tongue again, gesturing toward the poor shelter. “I am not a fighting man no more. No herd of ponies. Three old horses only. Sick, old horses now.”

  “And your wife?”

  For a moment the warrior glanced at the woman before he said, “She is a good woman for a sick old warrior now. She … spreads her legs when I want her. She cook the rabbits and deer I can shoot for us. She keeps me warm at night … and—she never runs away, afraid of me.”

  “Is she from your old band of Shoshone?”

  “No,” he admitted. “She is a Digger. I don’t have very much to give a woman now, but what poor things I can give is far better than any Digger can give a woman … so we are both content—for more than ten winters now.”

  “Children?”

  “They stayed with their father when I stole her.”

  That surprised Scratch. “This woman, she is your wife?”

  “Now she is. For the first winter, she was just my woman. I tied her up and made her stay after I stole her from her camp. But the following summer when I untied the ropes from her wrists and ankles, she did not run off from me. She stayed. Maybe she stayed because she had learned to feel sorry for this man who had very little left in his life.”

  Taking the seven steps that brought him down to the edge of the stream, Titus signaled for Flea to come out of hiding. “Maybe, Slays in the Night—she stayed because she had a strong heart for you.”

  When the warrior turned to glance at the woman, he caught sight of the second figure from the corner of his eye. Slays instinctively raised his rifle again as Bass shoved the boy behind him.

  “No, no danger—this here’s my son,” Titus explained in English, his mind working back and forth between the two languages. Then he tucked the muzzle of his longrifle under his armpit and, for better understanding, he began to sign with both his hands as he spoke. “His name is … I can’t remember what the Shoshone word is. A tiny crawl-on-their-belly.”

  Slays in the Night made the prairie sign for his tribe. “Snake?”

  “No. Smaller. Bites animals.”

  “A deerfly?”

  “No. More … smaller.”

  “Buffalo gnat?”

  “Not that either.”

  “Tick?”

  “No, smaller still …”

  “A flea,” the warrior said in Shoshone, making a sign with his thumb and forefinger as if pinching himself.

  Titus brought the boy out from behind his back. “Yes, that is the word for him. His name.”

  Slays in the Night stepped down to the bank and motioned them across. “Come over here and let me see this boy who has grown far too tall for his father to call him a little flea! Come over now … so I can look into the face of the man who used to haunt so many of my dreams.”

  He wanted to trust this old friend who had taken to stealing horses from white men even though he had had a long history of loyalty to trappers. None of the man’s reasons for that startling turnaround had ever been explained by the nightlong chase he and Josiah made going after the horse thieves back in ’33, nothing but a nagging hole left by not knowing why some men turned bad the way they did, why some men became something different, were not the friends he had once known them to be. But Slays in the Night hadn’t been the first. No, likely that had been Silas Cooper, along with Bud and Billy, his two obedient compañeros. Then Asa McAfferty came along to twist things around and tangle things up the way no one else ever had before. No, Slays in the Night was not the first to ride off on a trail Titus could not understand. And he sure was not the last to yank the ground right out from under Bass’s feet.

  “Hold the pistol careful,” he reminded Flea. “By the barrel. Point it down when you jump across the crik.”

  Titus stayed on the bank while the boy took two steps, then vaulted across the narrow stream to grab the Shoshone’s outstretched hand. When Flea was steadied up the bank, Scratch shuffled down to the edge of the water and jumped across with his rifle in hand, planting the butt in the dry grass on the bank as he reached the opposite side. Slays in the Night put out his hand to the trapper.

  For a moment he looked into this old friend’s eyes, pushed his rifle into his left hand, then clasped the Snake’s wrist. They shook once in a firm up-and-down motion, then freed one another.

  “That night so long ago—we could have killed you in your camp,” he told Titus in his language and with his hands, the expression on his tired, wrinkled face unchanged.

  “You didn’t because we were in Snake country,” Scratch replied. “And white men have always been safe in Snake country.”

  “When you killed the first Shoshone warrior riding with me, I should have killed you then,” he retorted, his expression grim. “It would have been right for me to kill you.”

  Titus wasn’t sure if he should feel uneasy that their meeting had taken this turn. “It would have been right for me to kill you for stealing our horses.”

  Slays in the Night sighed, then said, “But you didn’t kill me.”

  “What was worse, old friend?” he asked. “For me to shoot you, that would’ve made ever’thing easy on you.”

  Nodding, the warrior admitted, “To go on living with my shame after you had killed all the others but let me live … that was worse than a quick and merciful death.”

  Titus noticed the woman’s face as she watched them from where she sat, just inside the low shelter. He asked the old warrior, “So life is better now than it was so many winters ago?”

  Digging at an itch behind an ear, Slays in the Night came away with a louse that he cracked between the nails on his thumb and forefinger. “Once I was a rich man—many horses, a fine wife and children, owned many nice things. Then everything disappeared, even my friends and finally my wife. I took the wrong road trying to get back what I had lost. When I finally had nothing more to lose … when you left me standing there in the valley without a weapon, without a horse, without a single one of my friends … then I had nothing left in the world.”

  Slays in the Night motioned them over to the side of the fire pit, where the three settled on the grass in the shade.

  Titus laid his rifle across his lap and asked, “What did you do that morning after I left you, cursing me?”

  Before he answered, the warrior turned and looked over his shoulder, signaling to the woman to return to her work skinning the rabbits. When she had knelt nearby, her nervous eyes darting over the white man and the young boy, he explained, “I started to walk south. I struck the big river and found berries to live on. Tried to throw rocks at rabbits and lizard
s too. You can see I am not a very good hunter!”

  She whispered something.

  “My wife wants me to tell you her name,” he declared. “Red Paint Rock. She is named for some country where she was born far, far to the south of where I found her.”

  “You said you stole her?”

  “Yes,” he admitted quietly, his eyes falling to the ground. “By that time I had stolen an old gun from a trapper’s camp and a horse too. It died many summers ago—but by then I had another horse, and a woman.”

  “You were able to steal her because you had a horse and a gun.”

  “Yes. I had a horse and a gun,” he agreed, “but … I was very lonely. It took a long time for her to want to touch me when I forced her legs apart. But I think she finally understood how alone I was in the world.”

  “She’d never leave you now,” Titus said.

  “And I won’t leave her till the day she dies.” Suddenly his face grew animated. “We don’t have much—just these two poor rabbits. But you are welcome to eat with us when they are cooked.”

  “I have a better idea,” Titus signed with his hands as he was struck with the thought. “Both of you come eat with us. We have some antelope that I shot two days ago.”

  “Go get it, bring it here, and you two can camp with us,” said Slays in the Night.

  He wagged his head. “We already have our camp set up. My wife and two other children.”

  “There are more of you?”

  “Save your rabbits for another day,” Titus suggested. “Come have supper with us tonight instead.”

  “How far away are you camped?”

  “Not far—down the creek by the tall cone.”

  “I know the place like I know my own hand!”

  “I thought you would,” Scratch remarked. “It isn’t far, even for those tired old horses of yours.”

  Slays in the Night stood as the white man and the boy got to their feet. “Do you think we can go with you now? I don’t want to wait until evening. It has been so long since I have had new ears to talk to.”

  Bass looked at the woman’s expectant face, then studied the old warrior’s wrinkled eyes, the deep clefts, and his sagging jawline. “Yes. It will be good that you two come join us now.”