Death Rattle

by Terry C. Johnston

  Scratch dropped the .54 and passed the .50-caliber flinter over to his right side. There was no set trigger on it, Titus reminded himself as his cold, stiffened fingers wrapped themselves around the wrist and trigger guard. He was already close enough to his target that he didn’t have to bring the weapon up to his shoulder. Instead, he shot it from his side, bracing the cheekpiece against the bottom of his rib cage.

  The ball caught the tomahawk holder low in the face, shattering his lower jaw and driving on out the back of the warrior’s head as he cartwheeled backward a step, propelled off his feet to land flat on his back where he slid across the icy, trammeled snow.

  Two more of them remained. At least one more out in the darkness, somewhere. He wasn’t sure of the voices he heard—not certain of just what he had heard or the tally now as he pitched aside the empty .50 and started for the dogs on those creaky knees of his.

  Back and forth the warrior on his back swung his weapon, growling at the dogs that had sunk their teeth into his leg and his forearm.

  Dragging the second pistol from his belt, Titus swept in past Ghost, kneeling at the Blackfoot’s shoulder to press the pistol’s muzzle against the warrior’s forehead. That brought an immediate reaction: the Indian ceased his struggles, going cross-eyed as he stared at the muzzle for a moment, his face contorted in pain, before the eyes shifted again, glaring up at Bass’s face.

  “Git, boys!” he ordered. The dogs did not instantly obey. He could tell they loosened their grips, yet did not fully release the warrior. “I said git! Back off! Back, goddammit!”

  His eyes flicked up quickly, peered around, looking for one or both of the other thieves. Then the warrior moved beneath him—prompting Bass to press so hard with that muzzle he was certain he’d either cave in the bastard’s head or shove that head right on into the snow beneath the warrior.

  Seizing the man’s trade gun in his left hand, Bass grumbled, “Gimme that, you red son of a black-hearted whore.”

  He heard its twung and whisper, pitching himself to the side without thinking. More a feral reaction than anything approaching a thought process. Damn, if the arrow still didn’t rake along the side of his neck as he dove out of the shaft’s trajectory. It had been aimed at his chest. The explosion of the bowstring had warned him.

  But he had reacted in the wrong direction, diving low as the iron arrowpoint opened up a raw, oozy, throbbing wound along the great muscles where his neck met the shoulder.

  Landing on the snow, Titus twisted to look for the arrow, surprised it wasn’t embedded in him. A few feet away the warrior on the ground was fighting anew with the dogs. Scratch felt his trade gun pinned beneath his hip as the bowman stepped into the light, holding his weapon at the ready in his left hand, a half dozen arrows clutched in that same hand, arrayed around the center of the bow where they were ready for instant use.

  With a twung he watched a second iron-tipped shaft hurtle away from the bow. Scratch rolled off the rifle, rocking onto the hip—swinging the smoothbore up and dragging his palm back on the big hammer in a fluid motion. It was already at full cock. Praying there was powder in the pan, he squeezed back on the trigger. The huge frizzen spat a shower of sparks, and the pan spewed a flare of both fire and smoke an instant before the old fusil belched loudly.

  As that second arrow flitted past Scratch’s shoulder, the bowman was already stumbling backward, his weapon slowly tumbling from his grasp as he stared down at the red blossom in his belly with a blank look crossing his fire-lit copper face—

  A fourth warrior shrieked out of the darkness, a club held high overhead, a knife in his left hand. Rushing in under that head of steam, the Blackfoot didn’t have time to leap aside when Titus pitched onto his shoulder and held out the empty fusil, tripping the Indian as he stumbled past.

  Old as he was, the fear of death nonetheless gave the trapper a little prod at that flickering edge of winter’s darkness.

  Landing atop that stunned fourth warrior he had just tripped, Titus jammed one knee down on the forearm that held the club while he seized the left wrist and wrenched the Indian’s knife from his fingers.

  Rocking back on his knees, Scratch brought the long beaver-tail dagger into the air overhead, preparing to hurtle it downward into the man’s throat—when he stopped, staring dumbfounded at the Blackfoot’s face. And jerked in surprise.

  This wasn’t a man at all. He was a boy. No more than a youth. A goddamned pony holder! Come to fight like a man with all the life-and-death consequences of manhood. When he was no more than a goddamned pony holder of a boy!

  The eyes below him held a fire of such unmitigated hatred, for an instant Bass wondered why he didn’t plunge the knife right down into the youth’s sneering face itself. Instead Titus brought his right knee up to pin down the boy’s left arm as he shifted the knife in his hand so he could grip its blade.

  “Digger! Ghost!” he. cried sharply. “Off! Off now! Back, goddammit!”

  The pups eventually complied, releasing the badly mauled Blackfoot from their jowls.

  “Back, I said! Back!”

  Both of the dogs began to slink away, their teeth still bared, a low warning that rumbled in their throats as the wounded warrior began to shove himself backward, sliding away from the snarling animals. With one hand the Blackfoot reached out to claw himself along, while his wounded left arm snagged hold of that tomahawk stuffed in the sash wrapped around his blanket capote.

  Wrenching his right arm to the left as if cocking it, Scratch flung the arm sideways. The pony holder’s dagger caught the warrior in the side of his chest. Instantly dropping the tomahawk, he brought both hands up to grip the dagger’s handle, struggling to pull it from his body as he collapsed backward into the snow. His thrashing legs slowly came to a stop and he lay still.

  Beneath Titus, the youngster’s eyes slowly rolled from the warrior just killed to glare with hatred at the white man no more than a heartbeat before he struggled anew.

  With his free right hand, Scratch reached down and tore the stone club from the Blackfoot’s grip. He swung it to the side and smacked it along the side of the youngster’s head.

  All the fight sank out of the Blackfoot.

  Waiting a moment to be certain, Scratch finally got to his feet and stared down at the youngster while the two dogs loped up to stand at his side.

  “Good, fellas—that’s right,” he whispered harshly, his eyes scanning the treed circle around them. Listening.

  With his own heart pounding loudly in his ears, Scratch finally figured out that if there had been any more of the enemy, the dogs likely wouldn’t have been hanging back. They would have been charging into the dark for the enemy. That must have meant he had brought them all down. Including this boy.

  “Stay here with this’un,” he told the pups as if they would know what he was saying. “Stay.”

  Both of the pups surprised him when they did stay as he moved off. The dogs stood guard over the unconscious youth as Scratch hurried into the dark, finding the tree where he had tied Ghost, and cut the entire length of rope free. With it, Bass quickly knotted the Blackfoot’s hands together, then brought a loop down to wrap more rope around the ankles.

  Finally he stood and gazed down at the youngster. The boy would awaken to find himself all trussed up, with a good-sized goose egg on the side of his skull.

  “Well, boys,” Titus whispered to the pups. “You both was li’l hellions in that scrap—”

  The youngster’s eyes fluttered, opening half-lidded as the groggy Blackfoot attempted to gaze up at the white man.

  Bass dropped to one knee and stared into the youth’s face. He began to lower a hand, but the boy jerked his head aside. With his left hand pressed down on the youngster’s forehead to hold it in place, Titus brushed snow and ice from the side of the Blackfoot’s face.

  Then Scratch rocked back on his haunches and dusted off his hand. Staring at the youth, he sighed, “So what in the billy blue hell am I gonna do with you?”
r />   It began snowing just before first light.

  There was something significant to this particular quiet that awoke Scratch where he sat propped with his back against a cottonwood. The last thing he could remember was he had been looking at that youngster’s face. And now that was the first sight he had when his eyes snapped open with alarm.

  Of a sudden every muscle was keenly aware of the overwhelming silence as the snow soughed through the bare branches of the trees. Maybe there were more of them. Titus listened for a long time, weighing what he didn’t hear—but when one of the Cheyenne horses nickered in that gentle, contented way of their species, Bass finally let the air out of his chest again.

  “You been watching me, ain’t you?” Titus asked, more to let the Blackfoot understand he was awake than any attempt at language or hope for an answer.

  “This here snow means we ain’t goin’ nowhere, not till it’s passed.”

  So you just as well settle in till the weather breaks, he thought as he scratched Ghost behind an ear. The dog had its muzzle laid on his thigh.

  Easing onto his knees, he crabbed closer to the fire and laid on some more wood. Glancing at what wood he had dragged into camp the night before, Scratch prayed he had enough to last them that day and even into the coming night. With the big, fat flakes coming down the way they were, all too soon it would be next to impossible to find a lot of the small, loose squaw wood. So if he carefully marshaled what he already had, they might just stay warm enough, might not freeze before they could ride out of there and look for the Crow—

  “What the hell are you thinking?” he scolded himself under his breath. “Your brains must’ve gone soft! What the blazes we gonna do ’bout that boy?”

  Bass realized he couldn’t ride into the Crow camp with this enemy. Soon as his wife’s people recognized his dress, the quillwork pattern on his leggings, his hairstyle too, the Crow would drag him to the ground and begin to beat him. They’d inflict a thousand wounds on him, none alone enough to kill the youngster. But as they warmed to their fury, the men would turn the prisoner over to the Crow women. They would be the ones to carefully trim off the Blackfoot’s eyelids, ceremoniously castrate him, build a slow, smoky fire on his genitals, then … carve off an arm, quite possibly a leg—slowly, slowly, like butchering an antelope or mule deer. Until there was little left that would resemble a human being—nothing more than a scalped head with its eyes poked out positioned atop a slashed, bloody torso—its flailed skin blackened by countless hot embers.

  An involuntary shudder washed over him as he brooded on the horror that might await this young enemy at the hands of those women he knew in Yellow Belly’s band. Women he knew as mothers and grandmothers, sisters and aunts. Women who were the soul of the Apsaluuke nation. If men were its heart and muscle and bone, then the women were its soul. But … times before he had watched those same women grow increasingly more cruel and vindictive as they wrung every drop of retribution and revenge out of a prisoner.

  “If’n I let you go, I couldn’t give you no weapon,” Titus confessed as he settled the buffalo robe back around his shoulders and leaned against the tree again. The two dogs stretched out beside him and yawned.

  He was surprised his thoughts had already reached that point: setting the youth free. The Blackfoot might use whatever weapon the white man provided to take his revenge on the white man who had killed three of his companions. Then it struck him: Maybe one of the dead men lying here, or there, was a father. An uncle. Or a brother. Chances were very good that this boy was related to one of those Scratch had killed last night—if for no other reason than, for most of the mountain tribes, this was the way a boy stepped into the world of manhood: invited to ride along as pony holder on a raid conducted by an older relative.

  One of these dead men was shepherding this bad-eyed youngster into adulthood, Titus brooded as he watched the boy slowly work at the ropes strangling his wrists. After drifting off a little while, Scratch awoke, thinking he deserved to know if he was wrong about the boy. Or if he was right.

  “I kill your father here?” he asked as he stood and started toward the first body.

  Kneeling by the dead warrior, Scratch grabbed a handful of the man’s hair and yanked up the Blackfoot’s head, pressing the sharp edge of his skinning knife into the skin of the brow, right at the hairline. All while studying the youth’s reaction.

  The boy’s eyes filled with even more hate as he redoubled his efforts to free his hands from the knotted rope.

  “Naw. I don’t think this’un’s the one.” And Titus let go of the hair, dropping the head onto the crusty snow.

  One at a time, he went and knelt at the next two bodies—threatening to scalp them too. While the youngster did growl in a feral way, Scratch nonetheless figured it had to be the last one. Especially when he watched how the youth’s eyes widened as he knelt next to that third corpse.

  Rolling the body over so that the youngster could plainly see the dead man’s face, Titus filled his left hand with hair and pulled the head off the trampled snow. The instant his scalping knife flashed into view there beside the low flames, the boy started howling like a pup without its mother. He stopped his knife, then examined the dead man’s face.

  “He ain’t old ’nough to be your papa. Maybeso your uncle?” After a long, quiet moment while the fat flakes fell upon the leafless branches of the cottonwood around them, Scratch sighed, “But I bet he was your older brother. He was gonna show you what it took to be a man.”

  Slowly rising, Bass stuffed the skinning knife back into its scabbard as the look of loathing and fury disappeared from the youth’s face. Replacing it was sudden confusion, bewilderment, maybe even a little fear as the boy stared at the white man’s every move.

  “They was all brave men, son. Just like you was gonna be too.”

  He shook the coffeepot, heard some liquid sloshing inside it, so he sat the pot at the edge of the low flames.

  “Like I said afore: can’t cut you loose with no weapon … an’ I damn well can’t let you go ’thout no weapon neither.”

  That would be certain death. He might as well kill the boy here and now. Not that he hadn’t killed youngsters before—but none of that had been in cold blood. Shit, some Crow, Flathead, maybeso someone else, would run this youngster down inside of three days and butcher him.

  What the hell was he gonna do with him?

  As the dim light swelled into the pewter glow of a snowy dawn, Titus decided that he didn’t have to sort it out today. He could wait, thereby giving the right answer time to stew and cook, then bubble to the surface in its own good time. Sometimes weighty matters were best left to the closest deliberation he was known to ever give anything of concern.

  He’d think on it now and again while the day passed. Which meant one more day he was forced to put off his search for the Crow of Yellow Belly.

  At midmorning when the wind died a little, Titus awoke with a start and clambered to his feet. As soon as the white man made noise, the youngster snapped awake, awkwardly pushing himself back into a sitting position, glaring anew at his enemy.

  And that was just how Scratch felt as he stepped around the opposite side of the fire pit, watching the boy’s eyes. These Blackfoot had long been his enemy. How many of them had he killed over the seasons? Maybeso he’d have to scratch at that knotty problem sometime tonight after dark. For now, he bent and grabbed one of the stiffening corpses by the back of the warrior’s collar. Raised him up and dragged the dead man out of the copse of trees through the snow that had fallen deep enough to fill most of the hoofprints and moccasin tracks around his camp.

  He returned for the second attacker, dropping the contorted body next to the first, downwind and next to a three-foot-high snowdrift. As he stepped back into the trees he watched the youngster’s eyes and stopped in his tracks. Something different there now—no longer the unmitigated hatred. Titus wondered if he was a damn fool to think the boy’s eyes might be softening, almost pleading wi
th him.

  That third body was the boy’s blood. Family. Kinfolk. While Titus had given up on his own people, had abandoned his cold and distant parents, his sister and brothers back in Boone County, he had come to possess some strong notion of just what family could mean to a body. Over time, his woman and their young’uns—they had come to be the family he had long wanted to hold close, the family he felt he deserved.

  The boy began growling again, a wild, raspy sound at the back of his throat when Bass stopped at the third corpse and bent over to grab hold of the half frozen carcass.

  This time Scratch did not turn around in his tracks and trudge out of the trees. Instead, he took the dozen steps that brought him to the youngster’s shoulder, where he gently, slowly laid the cold body beside the boy’s hip. The youngster’s eyes followed the white man as he stepped away to some of his baggage, dusted off some snow with the side of his woolen mitten, then threw back the oiled sheeting and began to unknot a pile of red blankets. More than likely, red would be of special significance.

  Dragging the Russian sheeting back over the blankets and trade goods to protect them from the unrelenting snowfall, Bass trudged over to the youngster whose eyes never once left the trapper as he went and came. The black orbs were growing with wonder at what the old man was up to—if not downright consternation—by the time Titus stopped by the corpse, grabbed an edge of the blanket, and unfurled it in the frosty air.

  When he had it draped over the body, completely covering the warrior from his greased and feathered topknot to the soles of his buffalo-hide winter moccasins, Bass straightened once more and dusted snow from the knee of his legging.

  “I know this’un means something to you,” he said as the youngster’s eyes eventually climbed to stare into his. “Far as I know, for most of your people—no matter what tribe you be—red’s the color for war. No better honor I can give this nigger what tried to kill me than to leave him on his back, facing the sky. And cover ’im with red—head to toe—the color of a warrior’s paint.”