Wind Walker

by Terry C. Johnston

  “You can’t go!” he yelled at her as the gunfire withered, fading to the far side of the village. “No-o-o-o!”

  “See me soon … on the mountaintop,” she whispered with another gush of blood, her eyes fluttering. “In your dreams … see me real—always see me … in your dreams … real for all time to come—”

  He knew it when her body went limp and her head slowly sank against his arm, a last gush of blood spewing from her mouth onto his wrist. Bass pressed harder and harder on the wound, but the more he tried to plug up that hole, the more limp she became. Finally he stopped pushing so hard and slowly brought her against him again, folding her limp, lifeless body into his as he crumpled over her with a wracking sob that shook him to his core. His loose, gray hair spilled across her face and neck. Never had he felt such a cold hollowness like this—

  “Mother!”

  He heard Magpie’s cry.

  Suddenly his head jerked up and his eyes narrowed on his daughter’s face. “Get Crane and your baby into a lodge!”

  “Mother? Is she—”

  “Hide them in a lodge with you, Magpie!”

  Her eyes widening, she was once more his daughter, his little girl again. Magpie’s eyes registered the same mixture of grief and terror as was in little Crane’s as she scrambled to her feet. Crane instinctively lunged toward her mother’s body, clawing at Waits’s limp arm.

  “Take her now, Magpie!”

  As he pulled the little girl’s hands off her mother’s arm Crane began shrieking.

  “Go with Magpie!” he ordered, his words harsh, mechanical. “You must get out of danger. I will bring your mother with me. Now, go with your sister!”

  Reluctantly Crane let him pull her hand free from her mother’s blood-soaked sleeve as Magpie dragged her younger sister away toward the closest lodge—

  Five riderless horses suddenly hammered through the lodge circle, lunging this way and that to avoid the small child and woman clutching her baby. Magpie shoved her little sister into the neighbor’s lodge, both of them gone from sight through the gaping black oval. He was alone with the body of his dead wife.

  And an emptiness he had never before felt swallowed him whole. Nothing he had experienced with the death of friends or that young towheaded grandson. Not even with the unexpected death of their stillborn infant. No, none of the pain he had ever suffered in life had prepared him for the cold, gaping emptiness that had instantly taken a ravenous bite out of his insides and left nothing but a hollow, oozing pit.

  It was only slowly that Scratch became aware again of what existed outside his own flesh as the sounds swelled around him once more, the roar of blood that had surged in his ears gradually lessening now as the hole within him yawned all the deeper—threatening to suck him in after it.

  Gunfire and the hammer of hoofbeats thundering on the iron-hard winter ground. Men’s angry shouts and the shrill wails of frightened, mourning women. The snarl of camp dogs and the high-pitched, frightened cries and chatter of terrified children.

  Of a sudden he felt the warmth touch the back of his shoulder, almost like a fingertip brushing the back of his neck where his tousled gray hair had bared the skin. Slowly he looked up, over his shoulder, saw how the light was just then tinting the frosty branches of the skeletal cottonwood with a pale rose, the color of her blood smeared on his hands. The sun was coming up. A first, pink light had entered the river valley.

  “Arrrghghghghgh!” he cried in utter anguish, hot tears spilling from his eyes onto his cold cheeks, spittle spewing from his lips as he cradled her lifeless body against his hollow breast.

  “D-don’t take her from me!” he roared as he tore his face away from her hair, from that most familiar scent of her, and stared at the newly awakening sky.

  “Damn you!”

  How he cursed the spirits, the First Maker, this God who could chip away at him life by life. Leaving him hollow, empty of everything but for a smoldering hate that he immediately knew would drive him on until he had brought these killers to a reckoning. How long that would take, he did not know … but this craving for revenge was like a force of its own and would carry him on for as long as it took.

  Bass’s face hardened as he started to sob once more, slowly rocking his wife in his arms, groaning in a feral way like some wild thing caught and with but one way out of a trap. Except—this time he knew it was different. This time he would be required to sacrifice more than a paw imprisoned in the jaws. Gazing down at her face, he sensed those glazed eyes still somehow looked into his … then Titus reached up with his bloody fingertips and gently closed her eyelids.

  The coming of the sun set the cold ground mist to steaming.

  This first day of the rest of his life without her had begun.

  They weren’t hard to track, not these brazen Blackfoot, these remnants of a once-unstoppable force in this northern world. Decimated by pox many, many winters ago, the tribe was now but a shell of its former greatness.

  Perhaps that was why they had raided into Shoshone country, then swept back through the land of the Crow—attempting to recapture some semblance of their days of glory.

  Titus had to laugh at that. There was no goddamned way any of them could recapture their glory days. Red or white. Nothing was left for the old warriors but to die. Either die quiet in their robes, sucking desperately at a last breath as they lay inside a lodge … or to die as a warrior. Out in the open, among the rocks, out under the sky.

  We who are warriors—

  Remembering how Whistler, Waits’s father, had died, how Whistler’s son, Strikes In Camp, had died too. Brave men who had unflinchingly stared death in the face at that final moment and not been found wanting. Surely there must be some sort of reward for such men, surely there must be something more for each of us—he found himself brooding again and again over the three days following the attack on the village. Three days of chasing, riding, stopping only to water the horses, then chasing some more until a short halt was called because it was too damned black to dare moving on till dawn.

  Slays in the Night and the others slept in fits and starts on the cold ground, wrapped in a blanket or a piece of buffalo robe. But not him. There was nothing more he needed—not sleep, and surely not food. No hungers now … only to get his fingers around the windpipe of the one who had killed her. Titus knew he would remember that face, remember the pattern of the man’s war paint, for as long as this chase took. Something like that was burned into the back of his head like a red-hot iron brand would scour its imprint into a piece of smoldering wood. He saw the face, the paint, the warrior’s clothing every time he merely closed his eyes in weariness. The image was emblazoned behind his eyelids, refusing to release him.

  So much the better, Bass thought. It would draw him on until he found the man.

  The raiders had at least half a day on their pursuers, time that the camp of Pretty On Top gave over to caring for the wounded and the dead, reaching some count of the stolen horses, calling together the chiefs and headmen of the warrior societies.

  “It does not matter how much you argue on who is to go and who is to stay,” Scratch had snapped at these younger men. “It matters little what plans you feel you must make to pursue these enemies. Every word you waste is one more step they take away from Absaroka. Every heartbeat we stand here is one more it will take until we taste the blood of these murderers.”

  Quietly, Pretty On Top said, “You are not the only man here to suffer a loss—”

  “Then the rest of you who have lost someone you love can do what you want,” he interrupted and shrugged off those war leaders with a wave of his arm. “There is talk … and there is action. I am putting my feet on this last warpath now.”

  Titus had turned away and started back toward Magpie’s lodge, his son and his Shoshone friend caught by surprise but quickly catching up to him, one at each elbow. Of a sudden, Turns Back had lunged ahead of him, stopping right in front of the old white man.

  “Uncle,” he
said to his father-in-law with respect. “I will go with you. With the three of you. She was my wife’s mother. I will go with you—”

  “No,” Titus growled as he shoved his flat palm against the young man’s chest. “You stay here with Flea. I don’t want—”

  “Stay here?” Flea echoed as he circled around to stand in front of his father, towering over the white man.

  Titus looked up at the angry eyes of his son. “You have a brother and a sister to watch over.”

  Shaking his head furiously, Flea protested, “My sister, she can care for them while we are gone.”

  “Magpie has a family of her own,” Titus scolded his son. “Jackrabbit and Crane, they are your family now, Flea. Your only family.”

  “My wife, she can watch her brother and sister,” Turns Back said. “Flea will go with us—”

  “No—you two must stay and protect them,” Titus refused with a resolute wag of his head. “Someone brave must stay behind and watch over these lives that mean so much to me.”

  Flea drew himself up and looked down at his father. “Turns Back can stay and watch over them all until we come back to bury my mother—”

  “No, son—you will do that today. Yourself. The last act of love for your mother,” Titus explained.

  “Then I will do it before we go,” Flea said desperately. “So that my mother will be buried before—”

  “Don’t you understand, my son?” he snapped at the young man. “My feet have already begun a journey from which there is no return.”

  Titus started to step between them, but Flea caught him, held his father tightly by both of the old man’s arms.

  “Y-you are not coming back, Father?”

  He first looked into the eyes of Turns Back, then at his son’s face, seeing how the eyes started to pool. “When you watch my back disappear through the trees, you will then be the leader of this family—the protector of your brother and sister.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “No … because you are now the one called Holds the Fight,” Titus said, watching the new name register on his son’s face.

  “H-holds the Fight?”

  “You need a new name, son,” he said, the hard lines of his face softening. “Flea was a good name for a boy … but now you truly are a man. A man who has a family to hunt and provide for, a family he must protect. A father is the one to name his children … when the First Maker finally tells that father what to name the child. Just now I have heard our Creator tell me that you are Holds the Fight—because you will stay behind to protect your family.”

  With deep respect Turns Back quietly repeated the name, “Holds the Fight,” then put his arm across his young brother-in-law’s shoulders, struggling to speak as he held back the tears. “Yes, old warrior—the two of us will do as you have asked. Even though it will be painful to watch you ride off after these enemies without us at your side, we will honor She Who Is No Longer Here by obeying your last wishes.”

  “And we will honor you, Father,” Holds the Fight added, his chin quivering even as he stood taller than the older men. Quickly he unbuckled the narrow belt he had around his waist, that belt he had worn from the day Jim Bridger had given it to him when he was a gangly youngster that first summer at the post on Black’s Fork. From the long strap he dragged the beaded rawhide sheath and knife. “Take this knife with you, Father. Use it to cut the scalp from the one who killed my mother.”

  For a moment he stared down at the weapon held out between them, wanting to refuse his son’s request. Then he took the scabbard into his hand and peered into the young man’s eyes.

  “If I return with the scalp, I will bring back your knife,” he said in a whisper, his throat clogging with emotion. “But if I do not return … remember me always to my youngest children. Raise them to honor the memory of their father.”

  Holds the Fight lunged against him, encircling his father with his long arms, and they sobbed together for a moment before they tore themselves apart. Titus touched his heart with his empty right hand, then placed those fingertips against his son’s breast.

  “Let the memory of me always rise in your heart like the coming of the sun,” he croaked painfully. “It is here—in your heart—that I will always remain.”

  Holds the Fight clamped a hand over his father’s fingers, squeezing it against his chest. “I am h-honored to be your son, old warrior.”

  With his eyes tearing up again, Titus said, “Come now—I must say good-bye to Magpie, to Jackrabbit and to Crane too, before I go.”

  A large Crow war party had caught up to the two old men late that first night, not long after Scratch and the Shoshone had stopped in the dark to rest the six horses they were pushing so hard. The two of them had ridden out with three horses each, the strongest the old trapper owned. When one animal tired, they had changed to another throughout that first afternoon and on into the starry, moonless eventide as they loped, loped, loped north up the serpentine trail, across the wide patches of snow and long straights of hard, flat, flinty ground where the sun had burnt off most traces of the last storm. Theirs was a joyless reunion of determined men.

  “These enemies haven’t come into our country like this in many seasons,” one of the older men had explained.

  “Why now?” Bass had growled with bitterness.

  Pretty On Top said, “Perhaps we will know when we catch up to them.”

  “No,” Titus shook his head in resignation. “Chances are we will never know why they came.”

  They had pushed on as soon as it was light enough to see six horse lengths ahead. And by the time the sun was rising they spotted the Blackfoot raiders and their stolen horses far off in the distance. No longer was it merely a trail of hoofprints they were following. Now they saw their quarry. He even imagined he could smell these enemies in his nostrils. Maybe it was the strong turpentine scent of the sagebrush crushed under each hoof as the enemy pushed toward the Judith Basin. Strong and wild, the wind in his face, this pursuit infused him with youth once more. Just seeing those warriors and their stolen herd out yonder in the distance felt as if years had been shaved off his old hide. This was meant to be, he thought.

  This is the way it was meant to be.

  It wasn’t long before he admitted to the pang he was feeling somewhere behind his breastbone—the pain of regret and remembrance, the faces of his children swimming before his eyes as he yanked on the long lead rope to the next horse, a strong, long-legged pinto. At first the wild-eyed pony protested and jerked back its head, but Titus eventually had it loping alongside the tiring claybank he had been riding ever since first light.

  “Here, friend,” he called to Slays in the Night. “Hold my rifle for me.”

  “A new horse?” asked the Shoshone as he urged his pony close, on the white man’s off side, and took Bass’s old flintlock.

  It took a few moments, heartbeats really, to match the strides of the two horses as their hooves thundered across the iron-plated ground, heading up a long, long slope—the last before they reached the winding valley of the Judith. He knew this place well. Lo, the many times he had trapped these grounds, walked the thready paths of these feeder streams, fought grizzly here. If the Blackfoot were thinking to lose their Crow pursuers in this maze of hills and stands of cottonwood, to confuse those who followed in the tapestry of alder and chokecherry, willow and sawgrass, then they hadn’t reckoned on Titus Bass riding up on their tailroots.

  He leaned over with his right hand, intertwined his fingers with a handful of the pinto’s mane—then held his breath and rose up to one knee on the claybank. Up and down, up and down he moved with both horses, then suddenly leaped across to that painted pony that ran with its rib cage brushing against the tired, lathered claybank. The pinto grunted at the man’s sudden weight landing on its back. He shifted slightly, his crotch sliding into that natural groove behind the withers. Then he played out the claybank’s long rein, letting the tired horse seek its own pace some yards behind them a
s Slays in the Night eased over to his side again.

  “Here, you will need this soon,” the old Indian said, his eyes glistening with an inner peace.

  Bass took his rifle. “Your turn for a new horse.” And he took the Shoshone’s smoothbore, clutching both weapons across the crook of his left arm.

  When he looked ahead into the distance at the figures once more, Bass felt his heart leap in anticipation. He thought he saw that red blanket capote at the far right edge of the herd now. In the first dim, gray light of this cold morning the figures had all been black as sow beetles scurrying out from beneath an overturned cowchip. But now, with the coming of the sun, colors came alive. And in the fiery hue the sun gave this high, hard land, Titus finally saw the only one he had been chasing all along. The tails of the Blackfoot’s bright red coat fluttering out behind him in the cold wind that had quartered around to the northwest, smelling strong with the tang of coming snow.

  The horizon far ahead looked heavy with it too. All the way north to the Missouri itself, where it was surely snowing already. That mighty, mythical river a man had to cross before he could make these legendary mountains his own. A fabled and fated crossing that few men would survive. Some who had reached this land had already gone back, recrossing the Missouri to what had been before. Still more had gone on until they reached the end of the land and the great salt ocean washed up at their feet. But Titus Bass had stayed here in this high land that few would believe ever existed. Surely the stuff of a schoolboy’s myth, legend, and tall tales. Not possible for a man to have lived out the life Titus Bass claimed he had, those stiff-backed settlement types would say.

  It made no difference now. None of their nay-saying made a damn bit of difference. He was here, on the bare, narrow back of a young painted pony, and he had the cold, icy wind in his face … his enemy in view.

  With the coming of the sun at their backs, he realized it had turned even colder. So cold it felt like it would never get warm again. The ground beneath him hard as hammered iron. The sky above so blue it hurt his one good eye. The bitter wind made it tear, making colors run and swim.