“It’s snowing again, Magpie,” Bass prodded her. “Get up and come help me.”
She immediately kicked her way out of the blankets and robes, sliding on her knees closer to the fire where she rubbed her hands together over the rekindled warmth. “What can I do, Popo?”
“Bring more of that wood beside the door over here by the fire. You’re going to start heating up some water as I hold your mother while this baby comes.”
After she had begun to drag some of the broken limbs toward the fire pit, Magpie asked, “Did you hold my mother like that while I was being born?”
“I did at first,” he declared. “Then I was shooed out of the room.”
“In Mateo’s house.” She repeated the lesson she had learned in Taos last winter. “And when Flea was born?”
“I always promised her I would be with her when a child’s time came to be born,” he explained. “Except I was a long, long way off when Jackrabbit came along.”
“B-but you did not even know”—Waits huffed—“that I was carrying—your new child when you—left to go trapping that spring.”
“I would have been there for Jackrabbit, Magpie,” he apologized, “if I had known not to go to the land of the Mexican horses. Bring your mother some water to drink.”
He had Waits propped up against him by the time Magpie brought over a half-filled tin cup. After her mother had finished the next long contraction, Waits took a sip of the cold water, then a long drink, letting it wash down her dry throat deliciously. He heard the crunch of footsteps outside, the low murmur of voices just before the heavy, frozen deerhide was dragged aside and in came that spindly leg wrapped in a wool blanket legging, a buffalo moccasin so big that it made her feet look three or four times as big as they really were. Bear Below stood hunched over, one of the old woman’s arms supported by Flea. This was the boy’s eleventh winter, and he had begun to shoot up in the same weedy way his father had when he had been the same age back in faraway Rabbit Hash on the Ohio River.
“Did the boy wake you?” Titus asked.
“I have been waiting for this baby too, so I heard him coming to get me,” the old woman responded, tearing off her coat. “Look at those feet of his!” and she pointed at Flea’s moccasins. “This one could never creep up on anyone!”
She passed her blanket coat to Flea, then started shuffling around the fire pit to the rear of the small lodge. “You have had three births already?”
When Waits could only nod, Titus said, “Yes, this is her fourth birthing.”
“So, child—tell me how it is for you.”
“Not hard. I think this child will come easy.”
“I will see for myself,” Bear Below stated.
She slowly collapsed to her knees on the bedding, squatting at the feet of Waits-by-the-Water, and dragged back the top blanket so she could reach under it with both hands. Closing her wrinkled eyelids, Bear Below turned her head as if staring at the fire with those closed eyes while she felt about. Just about the time Waits began to pant through her nose again, Bear Below said, “That’s good. Let it come over you and carry you with it. Do not tense … do not—that’s it. You must remember not to tense your body, girl. Stay loose and the child will slide on out into this world.”
Bear Below rocked back onto a bony hip and settled there between the upfolded legs of the mother.
“Did you see or feel the child’s head?” Waits inquired.
“Not yet,” the old woman reassured her. “But very soon I think.” Then Bear Below turned to the white man. “Tell me, do you make good coffee?”
“I do—but I want to stay here beside my wife.”
Bear Below shifted her bottom so she could look over her shoulder at Magpie. “What is your name?”
“Magpie.”
“Do you make good coffee?”
She looked at her father, and he nodded. “Y-yes, I … well, my father tells me I do.”
“Make us a pot of your coffee, Magpie.”
As his daughter busied herself with the pot and some coffee grounds they brought north from Fort Bridger, Titus instructed his son, “Bring some more of that wood over here by the fire.”
The pot hadn’t been on the flames very long when Waits-by-the-Water announced, “It-it’s time now.”
Bear Below was already there between the mother’s knees, pushing the blanket off her legs, folding up the bottom of the long hide dress onto the swollen belly so that she had an unobstructed view of the birth opening. “Yes, girl—I think I see the head coming now.”
“I feel him coming!”
“A boy?” Titus asked his wife. “You think this is another boy?”
She nodded as she gulped air, huffing between her gritted teeth.
The old woman cooed, “There you go, easy now. That’s the head. Let’s turn a little and let those shoulders out too.”
Doing his best to keep his wife propped up as he leaned to the side, Titus attempted to get a look at this babe being born.
“You are doing good, mother,” Bear Below cheered as Magpie crabbed up close behind the old woman, looking over her hunched shoulders. “Just a little more. This next time you can push hard for me.”
Staring transfixed on the child emerging into the world, Magpie’s mouth hung open. “Little brother—do you want to see this?”
Flea asked, “Are you talking to me or to Jackrabbit?”
Magpie finally turned, finding Jackrabbit awake on the far side of the lodge, curiously watching the adults. “I was asking you, Flea.”
“N-no. I am fine right here where I am. I can see plenty well right here.”
“It’s a good thing too, Flea,” Titus told his eldest son. “You don’t want to get in the way right now—”
“It is done!” Bear Below cried out, moving that small child out of the shadows and into the fire’s illumination.
“Wh-what do we have for a child?” Waits inquired expectantly when the babe let out a gush of air, then began to howl.
Holding the newborn aloft, the long, purplish umbilical cord descending from its belly to disappear between the mother’s legs, Bear Below announced, “You have another girl!”
Waits began to cry, her tears tumbling off the edge of her face onto his arm. Bass wrapped up his wife in his arms, clutching her against him tightly. Then he slowly lowered her back onto the horsehair pillows and wiped the beads of sweat from her forehead. “We have another girl!”
“Here, white father of this new daughter,” Bear Below grumbled at him. “Hold your baby while I cut this cord and finish delivering this mother.”
Starting to tremble as he held out his hands to the old midwife, Titus felt his tears spill down his hot cheeks, his vision blurring with a salty sting. “L-look, Magpie!” he whispered as the child was laid in his arms. “You have a sister.”
Waits attempted to raise herself onto her elbows. But Bear Below scolded her, “Lay down while I finish the birthing, girl.”
So the new mother asked her husband, “Which of us does she favor?”
Bear Below looked up, her eyes briefly assaying Magpie. “Your oldest daughter—she clearly favors her mother, and a pretty creature at that.”
“Let me see her,” Waits begged.
“I think she will be a pretty one too,” Titus observed.
Stopping the work of her hands, the midwife said, “Even if she does look more like her father.”
“Oh, she does!” Waits gushed, clapping her hands together. She then reached out with both arms, imploring. “Here, I want to hold her too, husband.”
“Yes, see if she is ready to suckle,” he suggested as he positioned his infant daughter in the cradle of her mother’s arms and rolled her cheek against a swollen breast. The babe blinked its eyes in the flickering firelight and latched onto the nipple Waits rubbed against the girl’s lower lip.
“I-I wish my mother were here to see this granddaughter,” Waits sobbed, her shoulders trembling as she brushed a dark lock of her newborn’s
damp hair back from the brow. She looked up at her oldest daughter. “How proud my mother was of you, Magpie.”
She was crying too when she told her mother, “I think she would be very proud of this new granddaughter.”
Waits looked at her husband a moment, then again at Magpie. “Tell me, daughter—you watched your sister come into this world. Are you ready to be a mother yourself?”
She shook her head emphatically. “No. Not yet, anyway. Someday. But not soon. I don’t have a husband yet. Not even a suitor to court me.”
“And that won’t be for a long time to come,” Scratch admonished, patting the robe beside him so his daughter would come sit with them.
“Here,” Bear Below said, holding up a six-inch section of the whitish umbilical cord to the new father. “You will want this for your daughter’s amulet.”
“Put it in this empty cup,” he suggested.
“You will help me make your sister’s lizard,” Waits declared to Magpie. “It will be good training for you—when your time comes to start having children of your own.”
“I am not ready to be married yet, I already told you that,” Magpie protested, then softened her tone, saying, “but I will do all I can to help you with my baby sister.”
“I am relieved to hear you say you are not ready to marry, Magpie,” he told his daughter. “Because your father isn’t at all ready to give you away to a young suitor!”
Three winters had come and gone. That new daughter born in the deep of an awful winter night was walking and getting her nose into everything, if not her busy little hands. And what a talker she was, almost from the start. Noisy as a little bird.
In fact, Waits had named this little girl Crane, after her own mother who had taken sick not long after Bass brought his family back to Absaroka late that autumn of ’47. Whatever it was that sucked away at Crane’s strength and made her weaker by the day had been merciful in taking the old woman quickly. In that year they had been south to Taos and away to Bridger’s post, this woman had wasted away to little more than skin and bones, so light when Titus picked up her body and carried her to their lodge there beside the Yellowstone as the first snowfall whipped around their camp opposite the mouth of the Bighorn River. She almost felt dried up, desiccated, as if she had been lying out in that hot, endless desert the Ammuchabas* called their home.
The family cared for the old woman at that camp, and at two more campsites in the weeks that followed, until Crane finally gave up breathing one morning, no more tears seeping from the edges of her tired eyes. While she had been ailing, slowly dying, Titus hadn’t thought he would end up crying when she was gone … but there he was, tying the pieces of broken, discarded lodgepoles across tree branches for her scaffold, the hot tears spilling down his cold cheeks and disappearing into his whitening beard. After Waits and Magpie had cleaned the old woman’s body and dressed it in her finest, they sewed the body up in a brand-new blue blanket—her mother’s favorite color—a blanket brought north from Fort Bridger as a gift to the old one. Now it would weather in the rains and snows, in the ceaseless winds that haunted this high, hard land. The bright blue blanket slowly rotting like the body sewn inside it, returning to the winds that moaned through the bones that would bleach beneath the sun, winter and summer, and winter again in that endless circle that was life, and death, and life anew.
On the village moved, under the new chief—Pretty On Top—Titus’s old friend.* Over the years the once-impetuous horse thief who had been but a brash and daring youngster when Titus met him twenty winters ago had become a warrior of great note, offering wise counsel, bravely holding off his people’s enemies, kind and thoughtful in the tradition of the great Arapooesh. Often were the times when Bass had hoped a young leader much like Pretty On Top would court his daughter when her time came. But in the past few weeks those hopes had been hung out to dry. During this warming time of the year, when thunderstorms rumbled out of the west and Magpie celebrated her eighteenth spring, the first suitor to come scratching at the door-pole was Don’t Mix.
“Stay away from my lodge,” Scratch grumbled at the handsome suitor. “Don’t come around me or my daughter and there won’t be trouble between us.”
The brash young warrior took a step back and spread out his arms indignantly. “There doesn’t have to be any trouble for us, Uncle,” he said, using that familiar term of respect for an older man. Don’t Mix glanced left, and he looked right. “I don’t see any other young man come to call on your daughter. I think I am the only one who will marry her.”
“Go away,” Titus snapped. He did not like the man’s cockiness, wondering too if he had ever come off sounding so sure of himself when he was a youngster full of rutting juice. “Even if you are the last one she could marry in all of Absaroka, I would still not accept your presents!”
“One day soon I will bring you a lot of presents, Uncle.” The young man again used that term of familial closeness that served only to grate down Scratch’s backbone. “But for now—I must first make Magpie fall in love with me. So I will return tonight with my flute and play love songs for her.”
“I’m warning you—don’t come back,” Bass hissed menacingly, his eyes narrowed at the warrior who started to turn away with a wide grin on his handsome face. “You will make a lot of trouble for yourself if you bother my family.”
“Tell your daughter I will play my music for only her,” Don’t Mix promised, as if he hadn’t paid any attention to the white man’s warning, “tonight, when the moon rises off the hills.”
“No one will be listening!” he bellowed at the young man’s back, angrier still as the warrior walked away.
“Don’t treat him so badly,” his wife said behind him.
Surprised, Titus turned there in front of the lodge and found Waits-by-the-Water stepping from the open doorway. Right behind her came Magpie.
“Why shouldn’t I treat him that way if I don’t like him, don’t want him around Magpie?”
Glancing quickly at her daughter, Waits said, “We don’t have to like our daughter’s suitor, Ti-tuzz.”
“W-we don’t?” he asked, bewildered by his wife’s assertion as his youngest daughter followed them into the sunlight. “Wait, I get it. I suppose this is again one of those matters of the heart that a man is simply too stupid to figure out.”
His wife took one of his old, bony hands in both of hers and said, “No, we don’t have to like our daughter’s suitor. Only she has to.”
It slowly dawned on him, the way the sun came up at the edge of the earth. He looked from his wife’s face to Magpie’s. “Is this true, daughter?”
Magpie bent to pick up her younger sister and positioned the child across her left hip. “I think he is handsome, Popo.”
“You’ve told your mother this, and you did not tell me?”
Magpie dropped her eyes. “We’ve talked about him, the two of us, yes.”
“Your daughter told me of her feelings, Ti-tuzz,” Waits explained to her angry husband. “Don’t Mix is a very handsome young man. Any girl would be proud if he came to court her with his flute songs under the stars.”
“Even though I never played a flute for you—”
“You didn’t have to, husband,” she declared. “I already knew my heart belonged to you. Your flute songs didn’t have to capture it from me.”
After a moment of fuming that he was the last to be let in on this secret, he asked, “Are you trying to talk me into accepting this Don’t Mix with your sweet words, woman?”
“No, think for yourself, husband. Don’t Mix is a good warrior—since we met him those winters ago, you have seen how many successful raids he has led. Not only his good friends like Stiff Arm and Three Irons and Turns Back, but many others are always ready to go on Don’t Mix’s raids into the land of the Blackfoot or the Lakota.”
He did his best to calm the squirm of apprehension wriggling inside him, feeling as if these two women had already made up their minds and now they were going to
twist him around to their way of thinking about this young suitor.
“So Don’t Mix is a handsome man—”
“Very handsome, Popo,” Magpie interrupted with an enthusiasm that made her eyes sparkle. “The most handsome man in the camp!”
Titus continued, “And he is a good war leader too.”
“Yes,” Waits replied. “As a man, that is something you can easily agree on. You want a strong war leader for your daughter’s husband.”
“Wait!” he growled, holding up his hand as he whirled on Magpie. “Your mother is telling me you not only are ready to have suitors call on our lodge, ready to let them play their flute songs for you and talk to you beneath the blanket … but you are ready to marry?”
Her head nodded tentatively. “Are you angry because I want to marry?”
That made him stop and consider a moment. “I … I don’t know, Magpie. Perhaps I am not ready to think of my little girl moving away from her mother and father, marrying a man and leaving us to start her own family.”
“But I am not moving away,” Magpie protested. “I will always be close. We will live in the same village.”
“W-we?” he stammered. “Already you and Don’t Mix are a we?”
Waits quickly hoisted little Crane from Magpie’s arms and set the child on her own hip, laying an arm over Magpie’s shoulders as she said, “Your oldest daughter has had her eye on that handsome young warrior ever since that first day we came back from the Blanket Chief’s post on Black’s Fork, when Don’t Mix proclaimed just how beautiful he thought Magpie was.”
Titus looked at his daughter closely. “You have made up your mind on him?”
“Yes.” Then she tried out her winning smile on him.
“There is nothing I can say to convince you to leave your mind open and entertain other suitors until you can decide among them?”
Waits answered quickly, “This is not a matter of her mind, Ti-tuzz. This is a matter for her heart.”
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