Death Rattle

by Terry C. Johnston

  23

  He was relieved when the youngster ate something that next sunrise as the dawn swelled around them.

  Throughout the first day, the boy had refused to eat, even turning his head away when Bass offered him a drink of water from a tin cup from time to time while they waited out the snowstorm.

  “You get hungry ’nough, thirsty too—I wager you’ll let me know.”

  Bass knelt now, offering him some hot coffee, but the youngster refused it, preferring melted snow in another cup. Then the boy’s black eyes landed on the meat Scratch had roasting over the flames as the sky grayed. Carefully carving a long, thin slice from the venison ham that sizzled and popped as it cooked, Titus carried it over to the boy.

  Eagerly tilting his chin up, the Blackfoot accepted the offered meat, chewing ravenously as the white man let the long sliver of meat descend between the youth’s lips.

  “Bet you want more of that.”

  The youngster’s tongue flicked across his greasy mouth while his eyes danced back to that venison haunch broiling over the fire. The boy damn well ate more than half of the whole leg that morning!

  With the sun’s arrival at the edge of the earth, it was time to bring in the horses one by one. Across their backs he laid the thick wool saddle pads he had traded off Goddamn Murray, then cinched down each of the crude, wooden sawbucks before securing two heavy loads to the saddles, one on each side of the horse. Over the loads he diamond-hitched a drape of oiled sheeting that would protect his trade goods from even the most violent, wind-driven, horizontal rain.

  But, he sighed after finishing the knots on the last of the dozen horses, there was little chance for any calamity like frozen rain this day. The sun was emerging bold and brassy in a cloudless blue sky. As far as the eye could see, the whole world was bathed in white, cleansed anew. Damn near as virginal as this land was the day after God made all these fine, fine sculpturings for the few men what lived in such sacred places as these.

  Already the glare was growing intense. Here in the shadows of these big cottonwoods the sunlight wasn’t near so bad. But out there where he’d be spending the day in the saddle—that intense reflection off the snow would damn well blind him by afternoon. Winter sunlight was even more merciless than summer sun this far north.

  His lips were already burnt, cracked and sore as they were. Titus had been breathing hard with the sort of exertion a younger man would’ve taken in stride. But, Titus Bass was no longer a young man. He was having to admit how his body was tiring of the constant struggle just to do what he had taken for granted a decade ago—much less what he was able to do those seventeen winters ago when he first came to these High Stonies. He couldn’t help the hard breathing, or having to take things a bit slower, or being forced to pace himself at every major task that came his way … but he could do something about the searing heat of his oozy lips.

  Raising the flap on his shooting pouch, Scratch’s bare fingers located and pulled out the flat tin made of tarnished German silver. Thumbing in the spring-loaded catch, he flipped back the hinged top before wiping two fingertips across the hard, milky grease he had rendered from bear fat early last spring before setting off for the Wind Rivers: a three-year-old black bear he had killed down in the breaks of the Bighorn as a change of diet for him and his family.

  As he slowly worked the grease into his inflamed lips, Titus thought on how human that bear’s carcass had looked hanging there from a sturdy tree branch after he had skinned it. Damn near spooky. For days after he had ruminated on nearly every story the Yuta or Snake or Crow had to tell about their brother, the bear. Human or not, to have a look at one trussed up and skinned out sure could give even the most skeptical of men the willies.

  Then he sank to one knee beside the fire pit where the last of the branches had burnt themselves down to glowing, flameless embers. After putting a small dollop of the bear grease into the palm of his left hand, Scratch scooped up some of the blackest char he could find at the side of the pit and crumbled a little of it onto the greasy palm. Pitching the rest of the blackened wood back into the pit, Titus used a single fingertip to mix charcoal and animal fat together until he had a thick, black paste.

  Rising, he turned to face the youngster while smearing a gob of paste across the wrinkled, sagging skin beneath the one weathered, but good, eye. It would go a long way in preventing most of the glare he would suffer, since more than eighty-five percent of the sun’s intensity was reflected off that new, pristine snow they would be crossing in the day’s search.

  They.

  He wasn’t completely sure why, but sometime around twilight the night before, Bass had decided it would be they today. He couldn’t begin to reconcile leaving the boy behind, all tied up and left to the mercy of the weather, or critters either one. And if he let the Blackfoot go with a weapon, chances were the youngster might try to exact some revenge on Titus. Which meant he’d end up having to kill the boy. Then again, if Bass let the boy go without a weapon, what chances would the Blackfoot have to make it back to his own people with no way to provide for himself on the journey? On and on he had argued with himself throughout the day … until deciding that his conscience could do nothing but put off making a decision until he had come to a solution he could live with.

  A solution the youngster might come to live by.

  Kneeling an arm’s length from the youngster now, Scratch swiped a greasy gob of the fire-black onto his fingertip, then reached out to smear it beneath the boy’s eye. With a menacing growl that reminded Scratch of a cornered dog, the Blackfoot jerked his head aside, his eyes filling with sudden fear.

  “Why, you li’l son of a bitch,” Bass husked. “I’m doin’ this for your own good, dammit.”

  Again he tried to get the fingertip near the boy’s eyes, but the Blackfoot snapped his head side to side. Titus scooted a little closer on his knee. With surprising swiftness he brought up his left hand, pressing the heel of his palm against the boy’s forehead, pinning the back of the youngster’s head against the tree with all his weight. Try as he might, the Blackfoot could only shriek and snap with his teeth at the hand that proceeded to paint the colored grease beneath both eyes—

  Paint. Jehoshaphat! If that weren’t likely it!

  He released his grip on the youngster’s brow and leaned back.

  “Lookee here now,” and he pointed below his one good eye with that blackened fingertip. “This here’s what I’m doin’ to you. I ain’t painting you up for no mourning or grieving. Don’t you see, boy? This ain’t no war grieving I’m doing on you—so stop your damned caterwauling!”

  A few more times he gestured with that black fingertip, pointing back and forth between his own eye and the youth’s eyes until the Blackfoot quit shrieking and the panic drained from the boy’s face. Scooting backward a couple of feet, Titus stabbed his bare hands into the snow, scooping up enough that he could use to wash his fingers and that palm. Again and again he rubbed the snow over the greasy, blackened skin until he had scrubbed off about all he could, then swiped his palms down the grease-blackened, bloodstained, stiffened fronts of his leggings.

  Titus stood to gaze down at the red blanket. “What you figger me to do with your blood kin?”

  When the youngster turned and stared at the shrouded corpse for a long time without returning Bass’s gaze, Titus asked, “You don’t ’spect me to drag him along with us, now do you? Don’t you get that notion in your head—’cause I’d just as soon leave you here with ’im as have to drag his cold carcass with us next few days till we find them Crow.

  “Then what?” Scratch continued by asking the big question. Maybe just the rising sound of his voice as he posed the problem made the youth look at him again. “So we take your kinfolk with us when we run onto the Crow. What you expect us to do when those Absorkees find out I’m dragging around a dead Blackfoot? They’re gonna chop your relation into some mighty small pieces right afore your eyes—an’ you’ll go to wailing again.”

 
; He sighed, turned slowly around. And found himself studying the copse of trees. There. It wouldn’t take long. He could work with a rope, looping it over those two parallel branches—hoist the body up inside its red blanket and tie off the rope. Then he could shinny up that trunk and drag the body onto that pair of branches where he could tie it down in place. A good place for the body to rest, in one of those Bents Fort horse-trading blankets. A red funeral shroud for a warrior.

  What in blue hell was he doing? He’d near been killed by these sonsabitches more times’n he had battle scars. So why was he even giving a second thought to burying this red nigger proper right here in the heart of Crow country?

  “Shit,” he grumbled as he strode over to the cotton-wood where he angrily snapped off a few short limbs no bigger around than one of his fingers.

  Quickly he used his camp knife to shave off the bark from each one, making it smooth, then sharpened the end of each stick until he had a half dozen some eight or ten inches long. Not near as long as lacing pins that locked the two flaps of a lodge over its poles, but long enough for the job at hand.

  Dropping the peeled twigs beside the dead warrior, Bass knelt and rolled the stiffened carcass over. Dragging back the red blanket, he studied the young man’s face, then peered into the boy’s eyes. No reasonable man could deny they were blood kin. Then he gave study to what the warrior carried on his belt. Bass freed the leather strap from the buckle and dragged it loose before he resecured the strap and buckle and laid the belt aside. Not until then did he notice the whistle that hung from a thong around the dead man’s neck. At first it had been tucked out of sight in the warrior’s armpit.

  But by tugging on the thin strap, Titus freed it, dragging the thong over the dead warrior’s head. Some six to seven inches long, it was clearly an eagle wingbone carved into a war whistle. Someone, maybe a family member, perhaps even the dead man’s lover or wife, had braided red, black, and yellow quills around the middle two thirds of the whistle.

  He brought it to his lips, but just as he was about to blow the whistle, Scratch suddenly stopped. Aware that perhaps he shouldn’t out of respect for the enemy dead. For a moment, he returned the youngster’s quizzical gaze, then scooted over to drop the long leather loop over the boy’s head.

  “I figger that’s rightly your’n, son. Maybeso, he’d wanted you to have it. It and this here belt with his fixin’s and knife too.”

  Bass creaked to his feet, his knees grown stiff on the icy snow. “But I ain’t giving you that there belt and knife—not yet I ain’t.”

  He dragged out his own knife and crouched over the dead warrior. Quickly tugging on the four sides of the red blanket, he pulled them together as tight as he could around the corpse. Then hole by hole, he punched the tip of his knife through the flaps of thick wool and inserted the long, peeled pins that would hold the blanket in place as a crude funeral shroud.

  With two of his short lariats looped over a high branch above that pair of parallel limbs, and the ends of both ropes knotted around the frozen corpse—one at the ankles and one around the shoulders—Scratch went to fetch his saddle horse. When he had the loose ends of both lariats secured around the large pommel, Bass grabbed the reins in one hand, gave the youngster a quick look, then spoke softly to the roan.

  “C’mon—easy, easy now.”

  As he tugged on the reins, the animal slowly inched forward, taking the slack out of the ropes, then eased the body off the ground where it began to swing a little, first in one direction, then to the other, twisting slowly, slowly in a half circle from its two ropes.

  “That’s a good, girl. A li’l more, li’l more now.”

  He kept the horse moving a step or two at a time until the warrior had been raised high enough that the body hung suspended just above the pair of lower branches.

  “Stay put,” he cooed, patting the steady old roan on the neck before he turned back to the tree.

  There he stripped off his wide belt and the elkhide coat, then wearing only the buffalo-fur vest in that bitter cold, Scratch pulled himself off the ground, swinging up and onto the first low branch. From there he shinnied himself onto the pair of limbs growing just below the gently swinging corpse. With his thick buffalo-hide moccasins gripping the two branches, he steadied himself with one hand locked on that higher limb the ropes were looped over, then grabbed one of those ropes with his other bare hand.

  “Awright, horse—back now. C’mon back.”

  He clucked with his tongue too, a sound he was sure the roan would recognize from their miles and seasons together. The horse twisted its head around as if to determine where that noise was coming from, so he repeated it.

  Then reassured the roan, “C’mon.”

  It took two steps back. “That’s good. Just a li’l more.”

  Those coarse one-inch ropes slid through his callused palm as the red shroud eased down upon the two parallel branches. With a little more coaxing the horse inched back three more feet and stopped again; enough that Titus now had sufficient slack to loosen the knots around the ankles and shoulders as he crouched precariously on the limbs above the horse. One at a time he pitched the freed ropes over the branch above him so that they spiraled to the ground below him.

  With one final tug on the shroud, he had the Blackfoot’s body positioned along the strongest portions of the parallel limbs. Then he dropped to the ground himself to pull on his coat once more before freeing the two ropes from the pommel and stuffing their loops atop one of the packs of trade goods.

  Striding over to where the youngster had watched the whole ordeal in utter amazement, Scratch could read a completely new expression on the boy’s face.

  “I figgered it was what you’d done your own self … if’n you’d been freed up to do it.” He knelt with a sigh. “Time for us to be movin’ for the day.”

  Stuffing his knife into its scabbard suspended from the wide belt he buckled around the elkhide coat, Scratch worked at the knots tied around the youngster’s ankles while the look on the boy’s face changed to one of confusion mixed with no little fear.

  Titus rocked forward on one knee, locking the other knee down upon the youth’s lower legs. “Ain’t gonna hurt you.”

  Still holding the boy down, Titus pulled the rope free of the ankles and wrapped a loose end between the youngster’s bound wrists. Now he had a long section of the rope that would serve just like a lariat used on a led horse.

  “C’mon. It’s time you stood up,” he said as he took a step backward, then a second.

  Bass gestured with his free hand. “Stand up.”

  Slowly dragging his legs under him, the youth leaned his weight forward onto his bound hands and struggled to rise. But it was immediately clear that the muscles in his legs were cramped from being bound together on the cold ground for so long. Titus stepped around to stand behind the boy, wrapped both of his arms beneath the youth’s armpits, and grunted him to his feet.

  “Damn, son—if you aren’t a big chunk of it,” he grumbled as the youth came off the ground shakily.

  Standing there at that moment, it surprised Scratch just how tall the youngster was. The top of his black hair reached Bass’s eyes. And he felt solid as a hickory stump. Thin, wiry, lean as whipcord to be sure—but solid nonetheless. This was a boy already galloping down the road to manhood, that much was certain.

  For a moment the youngster wobbled unsteadily on his legs. Then he gradually got his balance, and Bass slowly released his grip on the Blackfoot.

  “You’re gonna ride,” he explained as he steered the youth toward the horse that had carried the pups in those empty baskets Scratch was taking home as a present to Waits-by-the-Water.

  “Take ’er easy,” he said as they kept walking, step by step. “Keep them pins under you or you’ll spill for certain.”

  At the horse’s side, Scratch gestured that the youngster was to mount. It took no further urging as the boy grabbed a double handful of the horse’s mane there at the withers, then spran
g onto the narrow back and settled himself. With the boy’s rope in one hand, Titus took the horse’s lead in the other and led them back to his roan.

  Mounting up, he brought the horse around and stopped knee to knee with the youngster. “I figger this can be easy for both of us, or it can be hard on you. You behave yourself and you can ride like a man. You don’t behave—why, I’ll strap you over that there horse like two elk hindquarters. So it’s up to you.”

  Scratch was just starting to put his heels into his horse’s ribs—when he stopped, his eye caught by that whistle hung against the boy’s chest. Bass turned a moment to gaze at the body on the limbs, then realized what he had done had one more step before all would be complete.

  “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.