Buffalo Palace

by Terry C. Johnston

  “I didn’t do nothing!” he shrieked.

  “Cooper!” Bass hollered, starting to rise. “Cain’t you see it’s their joke on Billy?”

  At Scratch’s words Silas jerked around, still clutching Hooks in both paws. “Their … joke?”

  “Yeah—I figure they knowed just how much Billy likes him his ruttin’,” Titus said with a shrug. “I’ll wager they thought they’d pull on his leg a bit.”

  Cooper shook Billy once. “Y’ didn’t know nothing ’bout this?”

  “How c-could I, Silas?”

  By then Bass was making sign, asking his questions of the Crow men, getting his answers amid the laughter the warriors were sharing. One hand on the scruff of Billy’s neck, Cooper watched too. After a few minutes Silas burst out laughing, so hard he had to let go of Hooks and bend over at the waist.

  “Say, Billy,” Titus explained, “from what I can tell, looks like this here wasn’t all that much a joke, after all. Seems like ever’ now and then the Crow have a boy what don’t wanna grow up a man.”

  Glancing quickly at the young man, who wrapped the blanket about himself, then whirled on his heel to head back to the lodge, Billy asked, “He d-don’t wanna be a man?”

  Scratch went on to attempt making sense of what to those four white men was the inexplicable, what was totally foreign to their world and time: this concept of a very powerful medicine the Crow believed those young boys possessed who did not want to learn the skills it would take to assume the role of a warrior but instead preferred to play with the girls, learning the ways of the lodge and how a woman was to care for her man. Rather than to chastise such boys for their differences and preferences, the Crow looked upon these young men as having been anointed by the Grandfather Above with some very special, and powerful, medicine.

  Indeed, among these people there was no such thing as homosexuality. Quite the contrary—these rare and respected individuals actually believed themselves to be women spirits imprisoned in a man’s body. The Crow revered such powerful medicine no less than they revered their clan leaders, war-society leaders, and women warriors.

  Scratching at his scruffy brown beard, not in the least attempting to disguise a silly smirk, Bass chuckled and went on to explain, “Way the Crow see it, Billy—you was the sort of hoss what likes his ruttin’ so much”—then for a moment Titus dug a toe at the ground, trying his best to suppress more of a giggle before he could continue—“they figgered to give you a crack at something a bit different in them ruttin’ robes, Billy!”

  Came to be that Bird in Ground proved to be a steadfast friend to Titus that first winter the four spent in Absaraka, home of the Crow. After being shunned by both Hooks and Cooper, days later the young man/ woman offered himself as a partner to Titus. But without embarrassment or shame this time, Scratch was able to get across that while he did not hanker to set up lodge keeping with the Crow man, Titus nonetheless wanted to be a friend.

  As the days deepened in the coldest heart of the winter, Bird in Ground took to riding out with Bass when the white man ventured off to set or check his traps in the surrounding countryside. Oh, at first there was some talk among the village folks—that much Scratch learned from Bird in Ground over the hours and days and finally weeks they spent together. There along the creeks and streams that fed the mighty Yellowstone, Bass and his Crow friend began to teach one another the first rudiments of one another’s native tongues.

  In those dark, cold hours well before sunrise, Bird in Ground would bring his pony to join Scratch at the trapper’s wickiup—a crude shelter made from lodgepole saplings, willow branches, and an old, discarded, much-blackened lodge cover where Bass laid out his bed and cooked his meals when not spending a rare night coupling with a Crow woman or having supper with a family somewhere off in the village. For the most part, Scratch survived that winter, when he turned thirty-three, without the company of a full-time night woman. Not that the hungers didn’t stir him at inopportune times, but for the most part there always seemed to be a woman available just when he needed one the most that season of the Cold Maker. So while the other trappers made lounging and women, talking and more women, their winter activities, it didn’t take Titus long to realize he had a lot of idle time on his hands.

  Just didn’t seem to make all that much sense to him to let the days go by with nothing more than another notch carved on a calendar stick to show for the passage of time. But when he had told Silas, Billy, and Bud of his intention to go back to working the surrounding streams, not one of the three showed any evidence that they were all that interested in joining him in his labors, there in the heart of winter. Evidently they were much more content to wait until the first arrival of spring before any of them freed the thick rawhide tie straps from the tops of their leather trap sacks. True enough and no two ways of Sunday about it: trapping was hard enough work—made all the more miserable still in the winter when a man had to sloe through thigh-deep wind-drifted snow just so he could closely examine the banks along the icy ribbons of streams or the caked shores of beaver ponds to find just where the animals traveled now that winter had frozen their domain solid.

  But time was what Titus was rich in that winter. A man with a bounty of time, Bass used his wisely so that by the coming of the spring hunt he found himself already a wealthy man in fine, dark, glossy beaver plews.

  Even before Silas Cooper’s outfit was ready to push on west toward the fabled Three Forks country.

  16

  In taking their leave of Big Hair’s River Crow, the four of them pointed their noses to the northwest, intending to strike the Yellowstone itself inside a week’s time. Leaving the upper Bighorn River country, they first had to push due north past a small range of low mountains, then cross the several forks of a creek system* before they could finally begin to angle off to the west.

  The chill, early-spring wind had grown strong and blustery by the time Silas Cooper’s ragtag band struck the valley of the upper Yellowstone—a wind that knifed itself right into their faces and sank all the way to a man’s marrow as the horses and mules plodded west, step by step, day after day. Beside the gently meandering river they made their camp each night, then marched on come morning. The four of them made quite an impressive outfit, what with all the animals they had loosely lashed together traipsing along behind the trappers—in and out and around the groves of stately old cottonwood and those mazelike copses of willow, chokecherry, and alder where the deer burst from cover, spooking the antelope into turning and bounding off across the open bottoms. Farther up on the slopes of the nearby hills the elk grazed and watched, seemingly unperturbed by the passing of so many four-leggeds.

  Some of those packhorses plodded a little less lively than the others: Scratch already had them loaded with the bulging packs of thick-haired beaver he had toiled through the long winter to trap, flesh, and keep vermin free as both spring and their departure approached. Indeed, as winter had aged and the weather hinted at warming, there had already been so many packs of beaver that come the first sign of thaw, Silas needed to trade for another ten Crow ponies from Pretty Weasel and Other Medicine, both brothers of clan leader Big Hair. Now there were easily two dozen saddle mounts, packhorses, and mules among the four trappers—an enviable remuda for any outfit and, as always, a juicy, tasty temptation dangled before any horse-hungry band of thieving warriors.

  Those early-spring days spent leisurely trapping from creek to creek along the Yellowstone were mild and sunny, the nights still cold and frosty. But as the season matured, the skies stayed cloudy for days at a time, raining now and again, whipping up tremendous gales often accompanied by icy hailstorms that drove the trappers to seek out the shelter of protective cottonwood groves or the overhang of riverbluff rimrock. Many were the times those sudden and capricious storms passed on by, leaving a layer of icy white piled in drifts across the ground. As the gusty torrents rumbled on to the east down the Yellowstone Valley, the four would cautiously study the receding clouds, peer h
opefully at the clearing sky overhead, then urge their nervous animals out of the timber and press on upriver, all those hooves crunching every bit as loud as if they were walking on parched corn spilled across a hardwood floor.

  Every day, the farther west they marched, it became clearer to Titus just how hardy and courageous the Crow people were. A huge country itself to protect, Absaraka sat squarely in the middle of enemy territory. As Bird in Ground had taken pains to instruct, to the east ruled the seven fires of the Lakota and their allies, the Cheyenne. On the south roamed the hostile Arapaho, the sometimes friendly Shoshone, as well as the Ute and the Bannock, while to the west lived the strong and amiable Flathead along with the Nez Perce. East of the great north star lived the Cree and Assiniboine. Yet a little west of north roamed the greatest threat of all—the fiercest raiders of the high plains: the Itshipite, known to white trappers as the Blackfeet.

  Three powerful clans—the Blood, the Piegan, and the Gros Ventre of the prairie—who banded together to form a mighty confederation that stretched all the way east to the English holdings of the Hudson’s Bay Company, then swept clear down along the northern Rockies until Blackfeet territory butted sharply against the home of the Crow.

  Although outnumbered nearly four or five to one by any of its great enemies on the south, east, or north, the Apsaalooke held steadfast winter after winter, raid after raid, generation after generation, as few warrior clans could boast. Ever since a time beyond the count of any man then alive, the Crow had given birth to their babes, raised their children, and buried their old ones in that land. Winter after winter they had defended their home.

  Although few, this proud and fearsome people, Bird in Ground had explained, was all that held back the tide of their many enemies.

  “Wherever you go from Absaraka,” the young man instructed gravely, “you take your life in your hands. I know of no others who would be satisfied to take only your horses.”

  Bass clawed at his itchy scalp as he replied in his halting Crow tongue, “These Blackfoot, they want my hair?”

  Bird in Ground nodded. “You will be careful when you ride west with the others?”

  “Yes,” Titus had assured his friend, who helped him trap and flesh many of those prime, blanket-grade beaver that winter, “we will all be very careful when we leave the safety of Absaraka. I aim to stay as far away as possible from the Blackfoot.”

  For a long time the young man did not reply, as he seemed to be weighing what he wanted to say to the trapper. Finally he said gravely, “Perhaps it isn’t only the Blackfoot you should be wary of.”

  Titus asked his new friend if he said that only because the other three made it more than plain they didn’t like Bird in Ground.

  “No,” was the Crow’s surprising answer. “I tell you this because I do not like them. And my medicine warns me that you must not trust being with them.”

  Trying to smile as if it were a joke, to make light of what caused him to sense a chill at the base of his spine, Bass replied, “The three—they took me in. They made me one of them. They taught me. They protected me. Why would they ever harm me?”

  “I only ask that you will be careful.”

  Titus scoffed, “I think you are seeing ghosts.”

  “Seeing ghosts?” the Crow asked, his brow furrowed in confusion.

  “You see something that isn’t there,” Titus responded. “There is no reason for my three friends to harm me.”

  In the end Bird in Ground gave Titus his solemn blessing, “May Akbaatatdia, the Grandfather Above and Maker of All Things, watch over you, my new friend.”

  “May the Grandfather hold you in his hand too,” Bass repeated as he sensed that same sudden and overwhelming sentiment he had first experienced years before on the Ohio when he’d parted from Kingsbury’s boatmen, “until we talk again, in a season yet to come.”

  Now as the four of them-moved ever closer to the great bend of the Yellowstone, Titus had many things to think upon throughout each day as the sun tarried in the sky a little longer, a little brighter. So much had he begun to learn in his winter with Bird in Ground, all of what they talked about and struggled over during those long, cold days spent trapping, hunting, learning one another’s tongue. From him Bass had learned of the tribal structure of many Apsaalooke clans; learned too of their am-maakalatche, or strong personal beliefs in their Maker of All Things. Bird in Ground taught Scratch that the akbaalia, or shamans, had the power not only to heal but to see into the future too. As the days of winter waned, Titus learned how family members related one to another within the clan through birth or marriage. And always, Bird in Ground told many, many little stories of his people’s history, tales dating all the way back to the creation of the earth.

  They were stories that Scratch listened to, then practiced retelling to assure Bird in Ground that every detail and facet of the tale was recited correctly. Some were stories that caused him to remember those parables taught him from the old, leather-bound family Bible laid across his mother’s knees by the fire in Boone County. Tales of faraway places and people with faraway names. And now he himself had gone as far, far away from that cabin at Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, as he figured those faraway people ever were.

  “I been told the beaver be as big as painter cats in the valley what’s other side of that pass,” Cooper stated as the last of the packhorses clattered to a halt behind them.

  Billy Hooks nodded, grinning wondrously as he said, “An’ a painter’s a big ol’ cat too, Scratch.”

  “I ain’t never had cause to see one myself,” Bass replied.

  “They h’ain’t a likely animal for a man to spot,” Cooper assured. “Keep back out of a man’s way.”

  “Not like a b’ar,” Tuttle added. “Why, a b’ar’ll just as soon mosey on down into your camp as much as a man’ll come to call!”

  “Best we find us a crossing,” Silas instructed, bringing the others back to the task at hand, his eyes raking the gravel bed on the far bank. “I figger this here Yallerstone gonna run high an’ wild with snow-melt one day real soon.”

  Bass pointed south up the narrow valley where the river originated before it took that big bend to the east. “What’s off yonder?”

  When Tuttle wagged his head, Billy confided, “I ain’t ever knowed of a man been in that country what could rightly tell us.”

  “Devil smokes,” Cooper declared as he turned his horse away toward the bank of the river. “Been told the ground shakes and spits water high as a church belfry in the air!”

  Turning to wink at Bass, Hooks guffawed loudly. “I heard me such talk afore, Scratch—and ever’ time I do, I figger ’em to be teched … right up here!” He tapped a dirty finger against one temple.

  “H’ain’t no flat-tails in the land of them devil smokes,” Cooper flung his voice over his shoulder as he urged his horse and some of the pack animals down to the Yellowstone.*

  “So I’ll be going where I hear there’s beaver the likes you ain’t never seen!”

  What water flowed in the river that early spring ran nearly as cold as winter ice when they splashed their way across. As wide as were the gravelly banks, the Yellowstone was still no match for the capricious Platte. Here the riverbed was rocky, far different from the sandy, shifting bottom that had robbed Titus of half his supplies, and the Indian pony. One leg at a time, the horse beneath him carefully set each hoof down, planting it securely among the rocks before raising another leg from the strong, clear current that slowly climbed to bubble halfway up Bass’s calf by the time they reached midstream.

  When he turned in the saddle, Titus found Hannah picking her way across with the other pack animals, the two bundles lashed to her back swaying one way, then the other, as she shifted her weight, each hoof seeking solid ground.

  Reaching the north bank, Cooper spurred his horse out with a lunge, pulling up and around on a high piece of ground where he waited for the other men and the last of their animals to leave the water before he set off to the w
est without a word. From that crossing the land rose abruptly into timbered hills. The four of them began to string the horses and mules out in single file as the sun continued to midsky and the trappers climbed toward the cleft* that would take them west.

  That night they camped on the far side of the pass, turning the horses out for a roll and a good dusting before picketing the animals as the sky grew dark. With the cold spring sky serving as a pallet for a million stars, Bass looked east from those heights at the land of the Apsaalooke they were leaving. Then he gazed to the west, where the sun had set beyond even taller mountains.

  Finally Titus asked the others at the fire busy sharpening knives or smoking their pipes, “You figger that to be Blackfoot country off yonder there?”

  “Blackfoot don’t come down this far south so early in the year,” Silas stated with certainty.

  “Where you hear that?” Billy asked.

  When Cooper’s eyes flared with instant anger, Hooks turned away to pick at the dirt caked under his fingernails with his skinning knife. “I s’pose you’d be the one oughtta know ’bout such things, Silas.”

  “Don’t want none of y’ forgetting that,” Cooper said as he arose, beginning to work at the wooden buttons on the fly of his buckskin britches as he turned toward the shadows in the trees.

  When Silas stepped out of earshot, Tuttle whispered, “You figger he knows if that’s Blackfoot country or not, Scratch?”

  “How the hell you ’spect me to savvy if he knows or not?” Bass grumbled. Immediately he felt sorry: if he should be angry with anyone, he should be angry with Cooper. Not with those who just followed merrily behind Silas come spring, summer, fall, and winter.

  Titus wagged his head. “Maybe we’ll find out for ourselves, fellas,” he said in a low voice filled with resignation. “But no matter how I figger it—Silas ain’t ever done nothing stupid enough to lose his hair.”

  “Scratch is right, Bud,” Billy agreed with a bob of his head and a grin that showed off that big gap between his top two teeth.