“When they get here?” Meldrum asked as he reached up to take the folded packet.
“Just now,” the young man explained. “Give me the note—but I didn’t want to open it. Brung it to you right away.”
“Good man,” he said, gazing down at the symbol hardened in the wax. “Who’s this from?”
Clearing his throat, the clerk said, “These here couriers said it’s very important, Mr. Meldrum. They’ve come all the way north from Fort Laramie, carrying this here letter from a man they called Fitzpatrick.”
Scratch took a step closer now, studying the dark, swarthy faces of those five strangers. That name of an old companion from their beaver days just did not fit into the scenario he was constructing with Bordeau tracking him all the way to Fort Alexander—
“Thomas? Thomas Fitzpatrick?” Meldrum asked.
The half-blood who had spoken before now nodded, echoing the name. “Oui, Thomas Fitzpatrick. He is … my booshway.”
The trader held his finger beneath the dollop of wax as he inquired, “Your booshway?”
“Hay-gent, In-gee-an hay-gent for all the mountains,” he said in a thick, barely understandable accent.
“If that don’t beat all,” Titus said with apparent relief that this special day would not be marred by the eruption of violence. “You hear that, Meldrum? Ol’ Broken Hand’s a’come the Injun agent out in these parts!”
“I heard tell of that last year, as I recollect,” the trader explained as he turned to the trapper. Then he looked back at the half-breed. “That ol’ white-headed boss of your’n sent this note to me?”
The half-breed nodded. “Is your name Meel-drum?”
“Close enough, it is.”
“Thomas Fitzpatrick write it for you,” the horseman declared. “You name on dis let-tair.”
Meldrum immediately turned over the folded paper. There it was, written in a strong hand.
Robert Meldrum, Trader to the Crow
Fort Alexander on the Yellowstone
He immediately flipped the folded paper over and dragged his index finger beneath the folds held down by that thick dollop of cracked and faded blue wax. Quickly he spread the paper with his hands, and his eyes danced over the neat swirls of ink made upon the foolscap. When he was done reading it in silence a third time, his lips moving soundlessly, Meldrum raised his eyes from the paper, gazing up at the older trapper.
“How you feel about making a journey with me, Titus Bass?”
He glanced at his wife, then asked, “What sort of journey?”
“South to Fort Laramie.”
“That’s where Fitzpatrick wrote you from?”
“Yes. You’ll come?”
“I … I dunno,” Scratch said. “Like I told you couple years back … last time I was there, I left ’thout good terms. Bordeau an’ some of his Frenchies—”
“That was long, long ago.” Meldrum interrupted. “I don’t even think Bordeau’s around anymore. ’Sides, you’ll be with me—I’m part of the company too.”
“Be with you?”
The trader nodded. “I want you to make this important journey with me.”
Despite Meldrum’s enthusiasm, it still didn’t sound all that good: the two of them riding off with these five half-breeds who might have been put up to some murder by an old antagonism. “Just you an’ me goin’?”
“Hell, no!” Meldrum exclaimed with his engaging smile, shaking that stiff sheet of wrinkled foolscap.
“I ain’t never trusted the Frenchies—”
“Them?” asked the trader. “They’ll be outnumbered all the way south.”
“Outnurnbered?”
He stuffed the paper inside his shirt and poured a little more brandy in their cups. “I’m s’posed to bring along the chiefs and headmen of the Crow nation: Pretty On Top, Flat Mouth, Falls Down, and young Stiff Arm, all of them comin’ with us. And more too.”
He wagged his head in deliberation, holding out his arm for his wife to come stand by his side. If the chiefs and headmen were coming along, then it made sense that his family could ride along with the delegation as well. Titus asked, “What in tarnation for?”
“Sounds of it, Fitzpatrick is callin’ in all the tribes to join him for talks at Laramie,” Meldrum said dramatically, patting the paper he had placed between the folds of his shirt. “Broken Hand says he’s gonna sit down with all them chiefs, and he’s gonna make ’em all smoke a pipe with their enemies.”
“Fitzpatrick figgers he’ll get all them war bands to make peace, one to the other?”
Meldrum nodded. “So I want you to come with the leaders of the Crow.”
Turning to Waits-by-the-Water, Scratch asked her, “You understand what Round Iron’s sayin’?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll go together?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
Turning back to the trader, grinning, he said, “Looks like we’ll go see for ourselves if ol’ Broken Hand gonna make a good peace with all them bad cases. Now, pour me some more of that there booshway’s brandy—I got me a wedding to celebrate!”
He didn’t awaken until the early afternoon of the following day, his head pounding like a hammer on an anvil as the sun finally slipped in beneath the bottom of the upturned lodge cover, making his flesh hot and causing his head to swim. When he eventually sat up and opened his eyes, Titus realized there wasn’t much left in the lodge. Someone had come and stolen most everything that belonged to his wife. His wife—
“Waits?”
She bent to her knees and stuck her head under the rolled-up lodge cover. “You are awake? How is your head?”
“Pounding like a drum,” he moaned, cradling his temples in both hands.
“Little wonder,” she scolded him in Crow. “You stayed up most of the night dancing and singing and pounding on any drum someone would loan you.”
“Don’t talk so loud,” he growled. “I can hear you just fine if you’d talk softer.”
“Go back to sleep until you feel better,” she said with a giggle. “I have too much work to get done before we leave for me to sit and argue with a drinker man—”
“Leave?”
“With Round Iron and the chiefs,” Waits reminded.
“Oh … right,” and he remembered foggily. “When?”
“Tomorrow at sunrise. Before then, I have to finish packing what we will take along for the children, and leave the rest with Magpie.”
“M-Magpie, yes.” He remembered her wedding too. And for some reason, that really saddened him. “She … doesn’t live with us anymore.”
“She has a husband, and they have their own lodge now.”
“Are they going with us?”
“No,” she answered. “Turns Back and those war chiefs staying behind are leading the people into the mountains—the Baby Place, Baah-puuo I-sa-wa-xaa-wuua, where there are the children’s footprints. They will find it cooler there, until autumn.”
“Right … the mountains,” he said as his head sank back onto the horsehair pillow. “The children’s footprint mountains, where the Little People live?”
“Yes. They might run into some of our holy friends, the Little People.”
Closing his eyes, Titus heard her shuffle off and felt himself drifting back into a blessed sleep. The idea of cool, shady mountains sounded damned good to him; at that moment he wasn’t so sure the air was moving at all. Heavy and hot. Maybe if he prayed right now the sacred Little People would answer by blowing with their breath, causing a breeze to drift down from their mountains that lay off to the southwest. He’d never seen one for himself, but the Crow steadfastly believed in these beings who were half human, half furry creature. Ever since the Apsaluuke people had come to this land from the Missouri River, they had been visited by the Little People. The beings came to heal the sick and wounded when the Crow healers could not. They came to protect the faithful who believed in them. And, they sometimes portrayed their sense of humor too—often making off with some small
object or another that they took a liking to. From time to time a Crow man or woman might realize they were missing something shiny and explain that the Little People had taken it. Then, years later, they would find the missing object lying on a prominent rock, or hanging from a tree branch beside a well-used trail somewhere in those mystical “children’s footprint mountains,”* always in plain sight where a shiny trinket would sparkle, catching the rays of the sun.
He tried to imagine what shape the creatures took, how they looked—because while every one of the Crow believed in the Little People, few, if any, had ever had themselves a good look at one of the mysterious and sacred creatures. Most times, the elders and prophets, seers and healers caught no more than a glimpse of the Little People out of the corner of their eyes. The hint of a shadow, the mere suggestion of fleeting movement … because the legends always told of the Little People doing their good in secret, away from the eyes of man.
Titus felt himself dreaming at last. Floating up the mountainside toward the cool and inviting darkness lit by a bright full moon and innumerable stars that seemed so close he felt he could reach out and tap each one, even set his big-brimmed hat right down on top of that gauzy, gibbous moon. He heard a rustling on either side of him and stopped, looking down to realize the horse that had been between his legs was somehow gone … and he was standing barefoot in the cool grass, the breeze nuzzling his long, graying hair. He turned to the side at the sounds of tiny feet scampering, but glimpsed only a half dozen shadows as they disappeared behind the trees.
From his right he heard more faint rustling and turned that way to look. All he saw was the tail end of some flickering movement as the creatures vanished before he ever saw them.
When he held his breath and concentrated, Titus heard the whispers. Straining into the black of that night, he listened intently, straining to make out the sounds. Voices, but not quite human. And the language they spoke … not anything he had ever heard spoken before in his fifty-seven winters on earth. For sure not American, but not Ute or Snake, Comanche or Crow either, not even what little Blackfoot or Mojave had fallen about his ears, and not a thing like Mexican talk.
Scratch took a deep breath and let half of it out, the same way he held a breath in his lungs when he was aiming his rifle … then listened some more, doing his best to recognize a word, some fragment of the foreign sounds.
These had to be Little People, he decided. For some reason, he knew he was the only human around these parts. Titus wasn’t sure why he felt so certain about that … but, after all, this was his dream. While the Crow could accept that they would never really see one of the creatures, Titus Bass wasn’t a Crow. He wanted to see one of them, talk to it—have the being talk with him, perhaps even show him some of their magic that so amazed generation after generation of the Apsaluuke people. Waits-by-the-Water and their children could believe in these holy beings out of hand, but Titus wanted to see for himself some of their notorious tricks and sleight of hand. The Crow had many long-held legends about Old Man Coyote—the well-known spiritual trickster … so maybe these sacred Little People had some tricks they could teach him.
“Come out here an’ lemme take a look at you.”
He heard a rustling to his left, then felt a brushing against the back of his leg. But as soon as he looked, it was gone.
“Stand still, so I can have me a good look afore you run away again.”
Scratch suddenly turned at more rustling, trying his best to catch a glimpse, for he was sure they were all around him at that very moment—and as soon as he had turned his head he felt as if something had trundled across his toes, the way a badger or porcupine might, had they not been such slow and lumbering creatures.
“Titus Bass.”
He understood that.
He grinned and said to the night, “You do speak American after all.”
“We talk so you understand us, yes,” the voice answered. “In the tongue of the listener.”
“Why won’t you show yourself to me?”
There was a pause while more leaves and branches rustled on all sides of him. Then the voice said, “We never show ourselves to you until you need us.”
Scratch smiled at that. “I need to see you, know you’re real an’ not just some dream of mine.”
“Dream? Why, you’re dreaming right now, aren’t you, Titus Bass?”
“Yep, s’pose I am.”
“Then—if this is your dream, you should realize this is very real,” the voice said as the rustling quieted.
He struggled to wrap his mind around that. Not since that night at Fort Bridger so many years ago had he given any thought to the two opposing worlds of unreality and dream, any thought to that unknown country where the two worlds converged, where they could ensnare a man into belief.
So he begged, “Why can’t you lemme see you?”
“Not till you need us,” the voice sounded soft, and only in his head, as if his ears weren’t hearing it. Instead, as if it were just inside his head all along. “Not till you really … need us badly.”
“When? When’s a man really need you badly?”
“Are you wounded?”
“No, I ain’t wounded.”
“Then you aren’t dying?”
“No,” he said testily. “I told you, I ain’t wounded an’ I ain’t dying.”
“Then why did you call us here to help you?” the voice sounded, edgy with anger. “We can’t understand why you’ve come here to this place and why you brought us here to help you.”
“Don’t you ’member: I’m dreaming this,” he reminded them. “I’m dreaming I was ridin’ up this mountain, into these here trees—when I thought I heard noise. I wasn’t thinking of you Little People, not thinkin’ ’bout your kind at all till I heard you movin’ around out there in the brush.”
He heard the immediate scampering of feet, untold numbers of feet, fading into the night.
“Wait!” he pleaded. “Don’t go!”
From farther away, this time certainly not within his head at all, the voice replied, “We have others to see to, Titus Bass. Ones who are in need of healing, people who are very ill—those who are dying—and the First Maker has sent us to find them because we are the only ones who can save them.”
“I ain’t sick … an’ I ain’t dyin’ neither,” he groaned. “I just wanted to get my own self a look at you.”
Now the voice whispered, so far away it was just barely audible. “You will see us one day, Titus Bass. But not until that day when there is nothing anyone can do to save you.”
“S-save me?”
“You will see us at last … on that day when you are prepared to die.”
* The Pryor Mountains, in present-day south-central Montana.
TWENTY-SIX
“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat, Meldrum!” Scratch shouted above the noisy hubbub of those war chiefs and headmen pressing up behind them. “I’ll be et for the devil’s tater if’n that don’t look ever’ bit like ronnyvoo camps down there!”
“Can’t claim as I ever saw that many Injuns in one place myself!” Robert Meldrum hollered. “Look at all them lodges and pony herds too.”
Both of those white men could understand the Crow tongue being growled back and forth among the thirty-eight warriors, chiefs, and old headmen who had accepted Tom Fitzpatrick’s invitation to join the other tribes of the High Plains and Rocky Mountains at this momentous gathering near Fort Laramie. These men of the north had every right to be more than a little anxious as they started down the long, low slope into the broad, yawning valley of the North Platte, where more than ten thousand of their most inveterate enemies awaited their arrival. Because they had the shortest distance to travel, the Cheyenne, along with bands of the Oglalla and Brulé Sioux, had been camping here for close to a month, since the end of August. In addition, a large camp of Titus Bass’s most implacable foes—the Arapaho—had come in to join the talks.
Two days back, when the Crow delegation had been nearin
g Fort Laramie, Meldrum sent Fitzpatrick’s couriers on ahead to learn where they were to camp. No chance for a big council to be taking place anywhere near the post—they found the entire countryside deserted. As the small party from the northern mountains drew closer, two of the half-bloods came galloping out from the adobe walls.
“They move the camp,” one of the men shouted as he reined up in front of Meldrum and Bass. He pointed to the east. “Over to Horse Creek.”*
“How far are they?” Meldrum growled testily. He was fighting some raw saddle galls on his rump, a trader unused to spending so many weeks nonstop in the saddle.
The half-breed squinted his eyes as he calculated it. “Less than two days.”
“Maybeso we ought’n stay the night right here,” Bass had suggested. “Close to the walls.”
Rising slightly in the stirrups, Meldrum agreed, “Let’s get down out of these saddles soon as we can, Scratch. Let the others make camp while we go have us a look around the fort.”
Throwing up a hand in protest, Titus said, “Naw, I left enough bad blood here years ago. I’ll just hang back with the family and these chiefs. You go have yourself a look an’ tell me ’bout it when you get back to camp.”
“Where you suggest we throw down our bedrolls?” Meldrum had asked.
Titus tugged down on the wide brim of his hat to make a little more shade for his eyes and peered across the 180 degrees of the compass. “If we’re headed east at sunrise to-morry—I’d say we might as well camp yonder in them trees, far side of the stockade. We’ll have water and a little grass for the animals.”
“Good idee,” Meldrum said as he started to rein aside. “You tell the chiefs that we still got a two-day ride.”
“Just you ’member you don’t tell any of them bastards Titus Bass is in shootin’ distance,” Scratch said with a grin.
Meldrum tipped his hat, saying, “I’ll meet you in camp soon as I get my how-do’s said to them booshways over at the fort.”
Later that evening after supper, when the trader arrived back at the Crow camp, Meldrum brought with him some of the company’s headmen and a young soldier. Since that spring of 1825, when he had run into three dragoons at the oft-abandoned Fort Osage, Scratch had seen only one other bunch of soldiers in all his travels—some of General Kearney’s men spotted along the road outside Taos back in the early winter of 1846. First to come had been preachers with their Bibles and whiny cant, then their white wives reminding a man of all the thou-shalt-nots he had tried to escape … and eventually came those wagons loaded with plows and milkers.
Wind Walker tb-9 Page 49