“You’ll wanna blow your kinfolk’s whistle, son,” he said quietly as he leaned over and grabbed the eagle wingbone, holding it up to the youngster’s lips.
The boy stared at him a moment, bewildered. Eventually he opened his mouth, leaned his head forward, and took the end of the whistle between his teeth.
Scratch settled himself in the saddle and nudged his horse forward, turning the roan about as he clucked for the lead horse to follow. The animal that carried Titus Bass’s young prisoner started away behind the white man.
And as they inched out of the skeletal shadows of that copse of cottonwoods onto the brilliant, shimmering white beauty of that pristine wilderness illuminated with a newly risen sun, Titus Bass heard the first tentative, eerie … and ultimately mournful notes of that eagle-wingbone whistle shriek behind him.
Unmistakably a warrior’s song: unearthly notes meant to accompany a fighting man’s soul on its lonely journey to that place where all warriors one day were bound to go.
It could have been a lot harder than it was, but for some reason the youngster understood that Titus Bass was just about his only means of staying alive.
That boy could have attempted an escape once, if not a dozen times over the next three days. At the least he could have struggled with the old white man when Bass led him to the pony, or when Titus helped him down from the horse. The youngster could have simply run off into the forest with his hands tied when he had to pee or squat.
But the Blackfoot was old enough to savvy which side his meat was roasted on. While he might hate the white man who had killed his kin or kith, and while he might well be scheming to make an escape of it somewhere down the line—the boy showed he was smart enough not to give the slightest impression that he might flee if given half a chance.
Not for a moment did Scratch think that the youngster wouldn’t sink a knife in the white man’s heart if he could get his hands on a weapon and was handed the opportunity. Why, it’d be damned foolish for him to believe this half-growed creature had suddenly turned docile. Not no young’un from such a warrior clan as the Blackfoot. Such a man-child was bred, born, whelped, and raised to be a fighter. In the marrow of him, Scratch knew Blackfoot were taught to hate Americans from the time they opened their eyes and sucked in their first breath. Taught to hate Crow too.
So what in the billy blue hell was he doing? Here he was, a white man—the one big argument against his indecision. And he was married to a Crow. Jehoshaphat! If the Blackfoot hated any group longer, hated any group stronger, than Americans—it was the goddamned Crow! A second powerful argument against his good-hearted charity.
Then you went and added the fact that in Yellow Belly’s village there were his two young children—half white and half Crow. Lordy! A third and a fourth mark against Titus Bass ever making a friend of the boy. What he needed to do was just turn the Blackfoot loose and ride away. Let the youngster go afoot, even give him some dried meat before he pointed him in the right direction. How had he ever been so foolish to believe that the boy might hold some compassion in his heart for the white man who had killed his blood kin?
Even if that white man had gone against his better instincts and put the body of that relative into a tree for a proper burial.
There was no changing what either of them were, and would always be. Enemies.
It was simply the order of things, and no mere mortal of a clay-footed man was going to change it.
For the most part over those next three days, it seemed the youngster rode along with his eyes as good as closed. If they were open at all, they were no more than slits because of the intense sunlight reflecting off that new snow. Especially during the late-afternoon when the sun was setting in the west, far, far in front of them—that’s when the glare grew most cruel. It made no matter to Titus if the boy was sleeping as they plodded along, picking their way among and around the snowdrifts, doing his best to stay to the high runs where the snow hadn’t piled up so deep or had been blown clear altogether.
It made no difference to the old beaver trapper … because the boy never made any trouble for him. The Blackfoot ate when meat was offered him. And he drank when Titus gave him the melted snow in a tin, or provided a cup of weak coffee at their night fires. When Scratch’s eyes grew heavy beneath the clear, cold pinpricks of white light shining through the black-velvet drape of winter light, he would crab over to the youngster and check one last time to see that the knots were secure, that those knots on the long lead rope itself were turned toward the wrist so the boy had no chance whatever to work his fingers on them. Then Titus would retuck the old blanket and a buffalo robe around the youngster before he crabbed back to his own sleeping robes once more, dragging the end of the long lead rope to tuck beneath his belt, to wrap a loop around a wrist: the slightest movement of his prisoner would alert the boy’s keeper.
Come his rising of a morning, Scratch would find the youngster hadn’t budged and had to be awakened. In the end Titus admitted to himself that there was no plotting to escape. That the boy didn’t lie awake while the trapper drifted off so he could slip off in the dark with one of the horses, stealing one of those extra guns Bass had plundered off of one dead Indian after another over the seasons.
Right from that moment Scratch had put the body in the tree and placed the dead man’s whistle between the youngster’s lips, the Blackfoot pony holder hadn’t given the slightest hint of struggle or treachery.
So it was that early on the fourth afternoon after the untimely convergence of their fates that Titus Bass spotted a low, thin blanket of fire smoke trapped in the cold sky, a grayish-brown band of it clinging just above the trees … and knew it had to be the Crow. If not Yellow Belly’s band, then surely they were Crow.
At the top of the rimrock, Scratch brought them to a halt and let the animals blow. He turned in the saddle, looking at the boy, and could see the youngster had noticed the fire smoke too. When those black-cherry eyes shifted to peer into his, Titus could plainly read the fear that was turning to resignation. A look that seemed to say, I know you’ve brought me to this camp of my enemies to test my manhood. And I am ready to die.
It was then that Bass understood what he had to do.
With a sudden sense of urgency, he realized they had little time before the sun would be making its descent.
“C’mon.
He clucked to the horses, his eyes briefly brushing the boy’s face, recognizing that the youngster was baffled again. Just when the boy had made peace with the fact that he was being led to torture and eventual slaughter, the white man was turning their little pack train away from the fire smoke and heading down the back side of the rimrocks instead of pushing on for the village that lay ahead in a horseshoe bend of the river.
It took them something more than an hour before Bass felt they had come far enough. They hadn’t crossed any pony tracks, so it was clear the Crow hunters weren’t yet working this side of the river for game. Here, two ridges beyond the north bank of the Yellowstone, Bass slid from his saddle and hit the snow, breaking through the three-day-old crust and sinking past his ankles.
Immediately he went to the boy’s side and motioned that he would help the youngster climb down too. When the Blackfoot stood unsteadily in the deep snow, Scratch pointed to his groin, pantomiming how a man held himself while urinating before he gestured toward the ten-foot-high willows nearby.
“G’won. Be ’bout your business, over there.”
The boy stood frozen a moment until Scratch threw down that coil of lead rope he held in a mitten. A bit reluctantly, the youngster turned away to trudge toward the thick brush.
The moment he did, Bass tore his mittens off as he hurried back to one of the war party’s ponies, where Titus began to work at the knots holding the blanket and buffalo robe the boy had been using the past few nights—the same blanket and robe Scratch discovered among the raiders’ horses the morning after the attack. He took a moment to study the Blackfoot animals—then selected one
. As the white man threw the robe and blanket over the back of the strongest pony, the youngster came back to stand, watching the process with no little curiosity.
Understandably, the boy was a little confused too—because this was not the horse he had been riding across Absaroka the last four days. Maybe, Titus figured, the youngster had decided something was about to happen now that it was clear this wasn’t just a brief stop to wet down the bushes.
With the bedding secured with a wide strap, Scratch trudged through the deep snow to one of the packhorses, where he lifted a flap of the protective oiled sheeting and freed a pouch of smoked meat. Then pulled out the dead warrior’s belt.
Scuffing back through the crusty snow he stopped before the boy and dropped the pouch at the youngster’s side. Bass took a moment to inspect the belt, finding a much used whetstone in a leather pouch hung from the belt, an awl in a beaded awl case, along with several small amulets—besides the large knife that swung freely from the thick leather decorated with tarnished tacks of brass.
With a sigh, he finally gazed into the boy’s eyes. Then freed the strap from its buckle and placed the belt around the youngster’s waist, rebuckling it at the front flaps of the thick winter capote. Taking a step backward, he looked the boy up and down. It was some time before the Blackfoot looked into the white man’s face, tearing his eyes from the belt where his bound hands rested, fingertips touching the heads of those brass tacks, brushing those special totems to some sacred power.
Quickly, before he lost the courage and will to go through with his plan, Scratch stepped close once more, his bare hands wrestling with the knots he had secured many days ago, knots he tightened every morning and night. Eventually, the cold, stiff rope relented and allowed him to work it free.
A breath caught in the boy’s chest as the ropes fell away and the trapper stepped back again, rapidly looping the lariat in his left hand.
“It’s getting late. Late,” and he pointed to the sun hanging in that last quadrant of the western sky. “Time you be going.” Then he sighed. “I may goddamn well be teched in the head to let you go free, with that there knife of your brother’s … but I still got ’nough sense not to leave you go with a gun. You’ll have to make it with just that there knife.”
He bent and retrieved the canvas pouch. Held it out at arm’s length to the youngster. “Here. You’ll need food afore you ever run ’cross some of your own people. Meat,” and he gestured with his right hand, fingers to his mouth as if eating.
The youngster took the pouch.
“G’won. That there horse is your’n now,” and he motioned to the Blackfoot pony he had prepared with the makeshift saddle pad. “I’m takin’ the rest of them Blackfoot ponies though I don’t really need ’em. Hell … what good is more horses when I got plenty awready? Likely just give ’em away when I get home to my family,” he explained. “Damn, if I ain’t seen an’ wrangled more horses than I ever wanna see again in the rest of my days, truth be knowed. A damnable breed, these big critters: we come to depend on ’em like no other animule, even them two dogs there. Because of horses I been gone from my woman and young’uns too long. Because of horses I near lost the rest of my hair and my hide too. Californy horses. Shit …”
His voice trailed off as he became aware he was chattering, running off at the lip like a nabob. He felt like scolding himself for that attempt to prolong the farewell that must now take its course.
Instead of speaking any further, he reached out with both hands, taking the boy’s wrists in them and rubbing, as if to return the circulation to the flesh where the ropes had chafed them raw. Then he turned the youngster around and nudged him over to the pony.
“Get up there. An’ go.”
The boy swallowed, slowly turned away, and took up the single lead tied to the animal’s buffalo-hair headstall. Without hesitation he leaped onto the pony’s back. But instead of immediately heeling the horse away in giddy celebration, the youngster sat looking down at the white man.
“G’won. Git. You’re burnin’ what li’l daylight you got left. G’won back to your own people.”
It surprised Scratch when the boy suddenly spoke. Even with those growls, and shrieks, and howls of fury that night of the attack—Titus had never really heard the youngster’s voice. Now he was speaking Blackfoot—as foreign as any sound ever would be to fall on Bass’s ears. No matter that he did not understand the meaning of the words, he could fathom their import from the tone and tenor of that young voice, from the look on the boy’s face, the emotion clearly seen in those eyes.
Even more than the spoken Blackfoot, it surprised the trapper when the youngster eventually put that eagle-wingbone whistle between his lips as he reined the pony away, urging the animal into a gentle lope through the snow as it carried him north from the land of the enemy, back to the land of his people.
It raised the hair at the back of Scratch’s neck when the winter wind suddenly shifted, a bitter gust bringing with it the eerie, high-pitched battle cry of that whistle.
And in that moment as the wind blew long strands of his graying hair across his face, a wind so bitterly cold it made his eyes water, Titus Bass came to understand that with the death of one warrior … another had been given birth.
24
He pushed the horses harder now than he ever had on their journey north.
Once Titus had them onto the bottom ground, he goaded the animals into a rolling lope across those last few miles as the setting sun first turned the layers of fire smoke to that dull, washed-out orange of the wood lily, eventually brightening into the same pale pink found in the shooting star that would poke its head out of the snow come early spring. Both dogs managed to match the pace he set, covering the icy ground beside the long-legged horses, their pinkish tongues lolling.
From the top of a low ridge he got his first look at the lodges. Cones discolored to various earth tones of brown, every pair of yawning smoke flaps blackened with unnumbered fires. A few of the lodges even supported by poles so long their shape was that of murky hourglasses plopped down in that narrow, meandering meadow beside the rocky creek he would have to cross before he was home.
Bass sensed his heart catch in his throat to look at what lay before him. The horse herd flooded much of the open ground where the brown cones did not stand in an irregular crescent, their doorways facing the creek. Knots of children engaged in the last games of the day, bundled warmly against the frightening cold, some of them trundling along the stream bank where free water coursed through a narrow channel between two borders of snow-covered ice. Each rounded rock along the shore was covered with a dainty dollop of fresh, white snow, like a scullery maid’s white mobcap perched atop her brown hair.
Of a sudden he heard their voices—excited children at play, the rattle of their sticks they raked along the rocks, chasing one another and scraping snow from the stones. Perhaps the older ones had been sent to gather up their younger charges now that night was imminent. Laughter, lots of laughter—
A handful of them stopped their running game and turned to face the ridge. Two pointed in his direction. More of their voices, louder now.
From the trees along the bank appeared more than a dozen riders an instant later. In that silence a moment ago filled only with the laughter of children, now intruded the clatter of pony hooves as the animals lurched off the low cutbank and onto the rocky gravel blanketing the sandbars.
He tore the old coyote-fur cap from his head and stood in the stirrups, waving the cap at the end of his arm. And began to shout, “Pote Ani! Pote Ani!” Four of the riders continued across the ford where the water slowed through a shallow stretch while the rest remained in position on the rocky ground.
“C’mon, boys,” he said quietly to the Cheyenne horses. “That’s home down there.”
After covering some forty yards, Scratch found a wide cut where the ridge had eroded, a cleft that led him and the horses down to the east bank of the creek where that quartet of riders was already wai
ting on the snowy sandbar.
“These are trading goods from the fort at the mouth of the Buffalo Tongue River?” asked Three Iron, a younger man, who inched his horse ahead to greet the white man.
“No, old friend.” Bass gasped with joy and surprise at seeing a familiar face. “They are presents.”
“So many presents?” Stiff Arm asked now as he urged his horse up beside that of Three Iron. “All these ponies are loaded with presents?”
“Yes!” Bass felt exuberant as he dusted off his rusty Crow, unused in so long. “My heart is so glad to be home again.”
A quizzical look passed over Three Iron’s face as the other two inched their ponies forward. “We … everyone thought you dead, Pote Ani” “It has been so long,” agreed Stiff Arm.
Bass suddenly felt some of his exuberance oozing as he realized just how long he had been away. “Yes, I have been gone many moons, but, look for yourselves … I am not dead.”
Three Iron gulped. “Your wife—”
“Waits-by-the-Water?” he interrupted the camp guard. “Does she believe I am dead too?”
With a wag of his head, Three Iron declared, “Like Stiff Arm said, you were gone so long.”
Then Stiff Arm himself explained, “And you did not come back.”
A sudden cold seized him. “My wife, and children … they—”
Three Iron turned on the bare back of his pony and pointed at the village. “They are camped at the southern end of the crescent, Pote Ani. Next to relations.”
For a moment he could not get the words out, his mind racing over the vocabulary, struggling to put voice to the question he most feared. Then, “My wife … Waits-by-the-Water, she did not give up on me to … to m-marry another?”
Stiff Arm shook his head, “No. She did not find a new husband.”
“S-so she is mourning?”
This time Three Irons nodded dolefully. “Yes. She has been alone for so long now.”
Titus was already jabbing his heels urgently into the ribs of the weary saddle horse as those last few words struck his ears. He yanked on the lead rope to the first packhorse as the whole string clattered onto the stony sandbar and entered the shallow ford. By now, more than fifty people had gathered on the far bank, a third of them children. They and a few camp dogs began to part as his roan came out of the shallow water, the horse’s legs dripping in the light that was leaking from the pale, pink western sky. His two dogs bristled warning at the curious curs that slinked too close, then stopped among the snow-covered rocks to give themselves a quick, vigorous shake from neck to tail root before racing to rejoin Bass’s horse as it lunged up the low cutbank and angled into the village.
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