Dance on the Wind

by Johnston, Terry C.

  Washburn jutted out his chin and slapped his chest once with a fist. “‘Many!’ I bellered like a stuck calf back at Glass as we was coming ’cross from the headwaters of the Powder, making for the Platte. ‘That’s right,’ the son of a bitch yest told me quietlike.’ If’n a man wants to see the hull consarned world covered up by buffler, he needs to take hisself on down to the prerra country come spring greenup. It’s there the buff graze and breed, moseying slow as you please afore the winds of the seasons. An’ they cover the hull durn earth from horizon, to horizon, to horizon.’” As he said it, Isaac pointed here, then there, then over there in emphasis. “That’s what he said, the truth of it too. I believe that nigger, Glass.”

  “As f-far as a man can see?” Titus asked, incredulous. He had wanted to believe. Then gave up all hope. And now Isaac Washburn was telling him the whole earth was damn near black with them.

  “Like a blanket coverin’ ever’thing,” Washburn added, kneeling slowly at Titus’s side. He held his open hands up to the glow in that little stove, rubbed them. “That’s the country I wanna go to see with my own eyes one day soon, Titus Bass. Clear to the moun-tanes.”

  “How come you been all the way out there—but you ain’t never got to the mountains?”

  “Hol’t on there, Titus,” Isaac corrected. “I been up the mighty Missouri for many a season now, trappin’ beaver for that greaser he-coon named Man-well Leeza. Then of recent I been at work for my friend Andrew Henry. But that don’t mean very many of us got all that close to them moun-tanes. While’st they was raised up all round us, we didn’t ever go to ’em.”

  “Never?”

  “Not once, no,” Washburn answered, kneeling beside Bass once again. “An’ when I was on my tromp with Ol’ Glass, we sure as the devil didn’t have us the time to go off lollygagging to look for no big buffler herds—man wants to keep his hair locked on, why—he keeps his head tucked into his collar out thar’ in that kentry. If’n he wanders off too much, the Blackfeet or them Rees yest might take a real shine to his skelp.”

  “What’re these here Blackfeet, and them Rees?”

  Washburn shuddered. “Rees? Damn ’em. Consarn them Blackfeet too! Baddest damn two-legged beasts God ever put Him on the face of the earth. Walkin’, talkin’, killing things is what Blackfeet is. Some time back they struck ’em a bargain with the Englishers to keep our kind out. Over the y’ars they been doing their best to make it hard on fellers like Leeza an’ Henry dealing in the Crow trade.”

  “Crow? The bird?”

  Washburn guffawed as he rose, his knees cracking. “Crow are Injuns up in that Powder River an’ Bighorn kentry. My, my—them are purty warriors—but a small tribe of ’em. They hate the Blackfeet ever’ bit as bad as we do.” He turned as if to shuffle away, tugging at that greasy blanket coat of his. “Til be off to get your supper.”

  “Maybeso you can find us something strong to drink too.”

  Washburn’s eyes narrowed. “Ye sure yer up to gettin’ yerself bit by the same dog nearly chawed ye in half last night, Mr. Bass?”

  Titus nodded, his head throbbing so—he was desperate, certain that only a little of the hair of that mongrel that had mauled him so badly would truly salve his pain.

  “All right,” Washburn replied. “Only ye’ll swaller ye some victuals first. But I’ll vow ye I’ll bring us back some barleycorn. Yessir. Isaac Washburn is due him a spree! Been a few seasons since’t I was last anywhere near me this hull consarn city. The up-kentry whar’ I been winterin’ ain’t much the place fer good barleycorn whiskey and white-skinned women, no sir.” He leaned forward, his face stuck down near Titus’s, aglow with a red shimmer from the stove. “I’m sure a likely young feller like yerself can show Isaac Washburn whar’ I can go to dip my stinger in some white gal’s honey-pot … now, cain’t ye?”

  He grinned lamely. “I get myself healed up here, Isaac,” Bass replied, “we’re gonna both go dip our stingers in the finest honey-pots a man can find for hisself right here in St. Louie.”

  “Whoooeee!” Washburn exclaimed, slapping the barn wall with a flat hand as he stopped and whirled about there at the door, the bottom of his blanket coat spinning out like a wheel. “Sounds to it like ye damn well better get on the gallop and mend yer own self right quick, Mr. Titus Bass. I don’t ’tend on waiting too long, now that I finally come back to St. Louie arter all these hyar winters of drinking bad-gut likker and wenching with red squaws. I owe meself a spree, young’un: white wimmens and good whiskey. An’ I’m invitin’ ye along fer the ride o’ yer life!”

  At the mere thought of swilling down a whole lot more whiskey, his head pounded unmercifully, sharp pins stabbing right behind his eyes. Titus licked his swollen, cracked lips, wanting to feel hopeful about something, desperate to feel hopeful about almost anything—especially … what might lie out there.

  Bass asked, “You really fixing to go on out yonder this year?”

  “Yonder to them moun-tanes?” He moved into the shadows at the door.

  “Wait!” Titus barked with a dry-throated croak, anxious that Washburn was leaving before he got his answer. “It true you’re fixing to light out there, going yonder the way you said you was—just go to the Platte and point your nose west?”

  “Cutting my way right through the heart of that buffler kentry,” Isaac answered, then paused.

  “Damn, but I allays hoped I could … maybeso one day do that too.”

  “Maybeso, Titus Bass,” Washburn eventually replied, his eyes glimmering like twelve-hour coals there in the shadows of that, doorway—staring down at the younger man intently. “Maybe ye nigh well get yer chance, at that.”

  22

  “There’s some got ’em a name for that hull kentry out there,” Isaac Washburn declared the next day as he chattered on and on, having found him some eager ears. “I heerd some call it the buffler palace.”

  Favoring the bruised ribs, Titus turned slowly to the trapper, who always lumbered close at one elbow or the other. “P-palace?”

  Swaying in his drunkenness, Washburn shrugged, absently scratching at his long beard. “I s’pose at first it strikes a man as a mite queersome name—but that’s what many of the boys call that prerra land out yonder. Whar’ buffler’s the king. Land whar’ the buffler rule.”

  Pumping on the bellows handle with the arm that did not pain him as badly as the other, Titus let that sink in slowly over the next few moments. From what Washburn had been telling him right from last night, that country must surely be what he had dreamed it would be: the land where the buffalo had retreated toward the setting sun—seizing dominion over everything as far as a man’s eye could see, a land from horizon to horizon to horizon ruled by those great, humped, mythical beasts.

  “Ye mean fer true what ye said last night?” Washburn asked as he wiped some of the amber droplets from his droopy mustache.

  “Said ’bout what?”

  “’Bout throwin’ in with me.”

  “You told me a man needs him a partner to cross country like that—the Injuns an’ all.”

  “Ye figure ye got the makin’s?”

  Titus turned, peering at the older man for a long time through his swollen, bloodshot eyes. “Look at me, half-beat to death … and you’re asking me if I got the makings?”

  “Damnation—ye sure as hell got enough ha’r in ye, Titus. Enough bottom to make it clear through to the moun-tanes. Yer the sort figgers something out to do, so ye put yer head down and yest go at it. That’s a good thing in a man what wants to step off into the middle of the wilderness. Ain’t no one else’t gonna care for ye then—maybeso a partner if yer lucky enough to have one.”

  “You had a partner afore, Isaac?”

  “Sure. Had me lots of ’em.”

  Bass had the fire punched now, so laid in the long piece of strap iron he was going to start forming into a spring for the first of those beaver traps he would fashion for Isaac Washburn, once more using the old square-jawed one of Hysham Troost�
�s he kept hanging from a nearby peg as his pattern. Not that he really needed to take it down and study it, measure it, see how things fit. In the last few years Titus had hammered together the springs and jaws, pans and triggers, to make some two hundred such traps. So despite how ragged his head treated him, this morning Bass eagerly went at the sooty work over the forge with a renewed relish, well before Hysham Troost strode through the door.

  Titus asked the old trapper, “Tell me how come that partner of your’n didn’t come here to St. Louie to have a spree with you?”

  Washburn straddled an anvil atop a huge stump that squatted on the far side of the forge and settled his rump, his eyes watching the red glow begin to bleed up long strips of iron Bass would soon begin hammering into the tempered trap springs. “Had him t’other affairs to see to.”

  “And miss out on a spree with his partner?”

  “Like I said—other ’fairs.”

  “I s’pose he’s got him a gal stuck away someplace, likely,” Bass said, slipping on a pair of blackened leather gloves with short gauntlets.

  “Ain’t got a thing to do with a woman,” Isaac said sourly.

  “What sort of man miss out on good whiskey and white women when he finds himself this close to St. Louie?”

  “Never did claim he got close to St. Louie at all.”

  “Did I prick you in a sore spot, Isaac?” Titus asked, shoving the iron farther down into the glowing coals, then heaving on the bellows all the more. “Sounds to me like you don’t wanna talk ’bout him.”

  “Ain’t him, rightly,” Washburn finally admitted. “It’s all that hurt an’ p’isen he’s been carrying round inside him for too long—gonna get hisself kill’t from it one day soon. Shit, he yest may well gone under by now.”

  “Your partner?”

  Isaac nodded. “I ain’t been partnered up with him long, just last few months, really. But ever since’t I knowed him, Glass been laughin’ danger square in the face for nigh onto a y’ar now.”

  “Glass?”

  “That’s his name. Claims he’s pertected by God, so he can do God’s work in taking him some revenge on them what left him for dead.”

  “He was left for dead?”

  “That’s him. The one I tromped through the last winter with, gettin’ to Fort Atkinson, floatin’ back down the Missouri to get here with what little I got left to my outfit.”

  “How long you been in the mountains, in that upcountry, Isaac?”

  Washburn visibly relaxed as his eyes stared out the half-open livery door where a cold, spring rain drizzled in gray sheets.

  “Been over fifteen winters, Titus. Damn but that do feel like a long, long time. I fust come out of Albermarle County, Virginia, in 1805. Moseyed west into the Cumberland country. Didn’t come to St. Louie till the next y’ar, and by oh-seven I was hired on as engagée to Man-well Leeza. Was a big fur trader in these parts.”

  “I heard tell of him a lot here’bouts.”

  “He died not long back,” Washburn continued. “Fella named Pilcher took over the company now. Howsoever, I ain’t had a thing to do with it for some time.”

  “You went upriver to trap beaver in oh-seven?”

  With a bob of his head Washburn answered, reaching beneath his long beard to take out his pipe and some tobacco. “That black-ha’red Spanyard led us north that y’ar—the winter Antoine Bisonette deserted an’ Leeza sent George Drouillard to bring him back in, dead or alive.”

  “Did he?”

  “Did he what?”

  “Bring him in?”

  He looked at Titus as if he were talking to a stump. “Dammit to hell—he sure did. Bisonette was wounded so bad, he weren’t bound to live all that long. Leeza put him in a pirogue with two other fellers, sent ’em south back to St. Louie while’st we pushed on. Later we heerd Bisonette died. Didn’t matter—wasn’t many of us liked him or Drouillard neither one.”

  “How far you make it up the Missouri?”

  “Me and others—like that friend I come to know named Henry—we went and built Leeza’s post on the Yallerstone, mouth of the Bighorn. He called it Fort Raymond. Then some of us tramped on over to the Three Forks kentry.”

  “Three Forks?”

  “Three rivers what all tangle up and make the Missouri River, see? That’s Blackfeet kentry—mess of them devil’s whelps.”

  With his tongs Titus pointed at Washburn’s greasy, blackened buckskins. “That where you come onto them there? Your outfit?”

  He rubbed a hand down a thigh, fingers brushing the strip of porcupine quillwork in colors dulled over time by many dunkings in high-country streams and bleached beneath a merciless sun. “Got this off’n a Mandan woman, truth of it, Titus. She kept me warm one winter, while’st I kept her an’ her young’uns fed. These’r leggin’s lasted me some seasons, they have. Only had to patch ’em up from time to time, down at the bottom mostly, where I soak ’em in the criks and eventual’ the skin dries up an’ cracks.”

  “Got them from that Mandan gal when you was up at the Three Forks?”

  “Hell, no, I didn’t, ye consarned idjit!” he roared, rocking forward off his anvil and pulling his skinning knife out of the scabbard behind his hip. “Hyar, now—lemme show ye yest how stupid a nigger yer making yerself out to be.”

  As Washburn went to his knees and began smoothing out sortie of the pounded clay floor, Titus stuffed the strip of iron back into the coals and gave the bellows another half-dozen hard heaves before he too went to his knees to hunker as close as he could while Washburn began drawing landmarks with the tip of his knife.

  “These’r all along hyar—they the Rocky Moun-tanes. Hyar’s whar’ them three rivers tangle up to make the Missouri. All the way over hyar on the Missouri, them Mandans live in great wigwams made of earth. But back hyar is whar’ the Yallerstone comes in. Sometime later on my friend Henry was to put him a post right thar’. An’ on down hyar off the Yallerstone comes in the Bighorn. That’s whar’ Leeza had Henry build him a post to trade with them Crow.”

  “The Injuns you told me ’bout last night.”

  Washburn grinned. “Maybeso yer head weren’t all so comboobled up as I thort she was!” Using his knife, he pointed back down at his crude map. “Cain’t ye see how far Mandan kentry is from Blackfeet kentry?”

  “Where’s Blackfeet land?”

  He dragged the knife tip in a great, long oval that encompassed a good portion of the land he had just described.

  Bass swallowed, shifting slightly onto another knee. “All that?”

  “Don’t ye ever go an’ doubt it, Titus. Blackfeet hold them northern moun-tanes like they was their own. An’ them goddamned Rees hold the river like they owned it an’ ever’thing upriver from ’em too!”

  “So you been up there, in all that country, since you went up with this Manuel Lisa back to 1807?”

  “No, I ain’t been up there ever since, ye mule-headed id jit! Didn’t take long for them Blackfeet an’ Assiniboin to start whittling away at the first of us into that kentry. Some durn good men left their bones to bleach in the sun up that way. Rest of us turned tail an’ come easin’ back downriver in 1811. Already them British bastards was making it mighty hard for Americans to work the beaver kentry up north. They was a sneaky lot—still are, for my money. Come down from Canaydee—sellin’ them blood-suckin’ Injuns guns an’ powder, siccin’ ’em on Americans. That war we fought agin ’em didn’t help, didn’t help a tinker’s damn up thar’ in that north kentry.”

  Washburn spoke the truth of it. By the time the War of 1812 had worn itself out and America had negotiated a border, along with some agreements regarding exploration and control of the fur trade in the far Northwest—the Hudson’s Bay Company already had consolidated everything west of the Rocky Mountains while the Northwest Company Nor’Westers had a firm hold on the entire upper Missouri country east of the continental divide. With the hostile Blackfoot confederation driving Manuel Lisa and Andrew Henry out of that prime beaver country
, the whole of the upper Missouri drainage was again cleared of American interests for many years.

  Nevertheless, they did leave behind one man in abandoning their Bighorn post in 1811.

  “Onliest trapper we left up thar’ was one of the mulatto fellers,” Isaac related.

  Bass turned from his anvil, beads of sweat standing out on his brow like glittering diamonds, his thick brown eyebrows soaked. “A Negra?”

  “He t’weren’t as dark as most Negras I see’d afore. Name o’ Edward Rose—the one we left behind when we put the Bighorn post at our backs.”

  Bass drove the hammer down on the glowing spring metal, spacing his words between each resounding ring of hammer on steel. “Why’d he … stay on … up there … seeing how … things were … mighty hot … in that country?”

  “Wanted to live on with them Crow.”

  The hammer came to a stop, and he stuffed the half-finished spring back into the coals, heaving down on the bellows handle to excite the fire. “Gone off to live with Injuns … just like a Injun?”

  Washburn nodded. “Them Crow have mighty handsome wimmens, Titus.” He licked his lips visibly. “Mighty, mighty handsome wimmens.”

  “What become of you when Manuel Lisa pulled out of that country?” Bass inquired, leaning over the red cedar piggin and bringing the ladle to his lips, drinking long and slow.

  “I stayed on with Henry. He been my friend right from that first winter in that up-country. I throwed in with him whar’ he was going.”

  With their desertion of the upper Missouri, Andrew Henry initially dropped downriver with Manuel Lisa. But while the Spaniard established a new base of operations at a new Fort Lisa raised near Council Bluffs, Andrew Henry figured he’d had himself enough of the Indian trade. He tromped on back home, while Lisa carried on a lively trade up the river as far as the Mandan villages, eastward to the Sac and Fox, from time to time bartering with bands of the westward-migrating Sioux. But due to the well-financed encroachments of the British companies coupled with the economic hardships brought the infant nation by the War of 1812, after more than a dozen years on the upper rivers, the American fur trade was no bigger when hostilities ended with the English, no stronger among the tribes in 1815 than the trade had been in 1804.