Ride the Moon Down

by Terry C. Johnston

  “We honor this gift you have given the two of us, First Maker!” he said now.

  “This little one who you knew would make a place for herself in our hearts.”

  Slowly, the baby slowed her leg’s gyrations, quieted her fussing.

  “You gave this little one her name at the very beginning—even from the start of time … and you have waited for us to discover her name for ourselves.”

  The child cooed, reaching for those sparks that spiraled upward from the flames leaping inches from Bass’s knees. Then he realized his daughter was no longer trying to catch the daring, dancing sparks. Instead she reached for those twinkling bits of light just beyond her reach, those stars flung against the blackened backdrop.

  “Help us protect her, to raise her right, strong, and straight. Help us to teach her to know you,” he said, feeling the first tear spill from his brimming eyes.

  The infant was talking again, not chattering at her father, but babbling at those flecks of light in the sky above her. Just beyond her reach.

  “We know she is our child for only a short time, Grandfather. We know you have been so kind to part with her while she comes to us for a short time. Help us both to see that she walks the right trail. And help us to make her happy.”

  At the end of his arms the babe stretched out her arms again and again, flexing her tiny, pudgy fingers, trying to scoop up the glittering specks of brilliant light as her happy, constant chatter grew all the bolder.

  “So you have told me her name,” Bass said, both eyes streaming now as he gazed upon his daughter. “We ask your blessings on this child who will be called … Magpie.”

  Quickly he looked over at his wife. Tears suddenly spilled from her eyes too as she brought the fingertips of both hands to her lips, smiling and sobbing at the same time. Waits nodded to him, then looked at their daughter there above them both in the copper firelight.

  Past the happy sob clogging her throat, Waits-by-the-Water pushed the word, “M-magpie.”

  “Magpie,” Bass repeated as he lowered the babe into his wife’s arms, “this little talking one called Magpie has come to be with us for a while.”

  As they followed Ham’s Fork down to its mouth to depart the valley, Bass had kept his pony close to Waits’s horse. The rendezvous site was crowded with coyotes, a few lanky-legged wolves, and flocks of big-winged, wrinkled-necked buzzards flapping and cawing out of the sky all around them.

  Zeke strained at the length of rope tied round his neck, yanking on the strong hand that restrained him as Titus led them east. “Easy, boy. Easy.”

  From far and wide, what had called in those predators was the stench.

  Those streamside camps once filled with over six hundred white men along with some three-times-that-many Indians was making for quite a feast of carrion. Several snarling wolves or angry, flapping, snapping vultures clustered around every butchered carcass or gut-pile left behind. So bold had these predators become with their feasting that the sound of the horses’ approach did not drive off the four-legged and birds, much less the sight of those horses and humans as Scratch took his family past the refuse of each of Rocky Mountain Fur’s progressive camps, Wyeth’s camp, and finally what had been American Fur’s camp where Ham’s Fork poured into Black’s Fork.

  It was good, he thought, so good to leave that place where so many had crowded together with all their noise. That place of grass trampled beneath so many moccasins and hooves, what grass hadn’t been cropped and chewed by the thousands of horses. But given a winter to lie fallow beneath the snows of this high, arid country, those meadows along the creek would cloak themselves in a thick coat of green come spring’s torrents.

  How much he had been looking forward to their return to Absaroka.

  All the memories flooded together as they crossed the Green and made for the southern end of the Wind River Mountains where they climbed up the west side of the southern pass and crossed over to the Sweetwater before striking due north for the Popo Agie, following it as they rose into the eastern slopes of the mountains.

  For several weeks they leisurely clung to the high country, working their way north by west through the rugged Wind River Range until they reached the country where the passes either carried them west to Davy Jackson’s Hole, or north into the forbidding fastness of the hulking Absaroka Range. Instead they turned southeast around the end of those mighty hills and made for the Owl Mountains.

  For another month he had them mosey north along the foothills of the Absaroka Range, stopping to camp for a night or two along every stream where they found the beaver active, at the edge of every flooded meadow where the flat-tails had erected their dams and lodges, felling their trees and raising their young.

  Before leaving camp for his traplines each morning, Bass freshly primed a pair of smoothbore fusils and their two extra rifles, along with a brace of pistols, leaving them propped here and there against their shelter, or astride beaver packs—somewhere easily within her reach. Besides those usual chores of tending to the baby’s needs, bringing in firewood, making repairs to moccasins and clothing, or preparing meals for her ravenous husband, Waits-by-the-Water again proved herself an invaluable camp keeper by expertly fleshing every beaver hide he dragged in, cleaning it of fat and excess connective tissue after Scratch pulled the heavy green hide off the carcass at streamside. Last fall in the Bayou Salade he had taught her how to lash the green hide inside a large willow hoop, threading a long rawhide whang round and round as she stretched the beaver skin to dry.

  At most camps they snuffed their fire by twilight and warily slept out the night in a darkness that made those autumn nights feel all the colder. As sociable as the horses were, as gregarious as was young Samantha—Bass figured it was nonetheless far better that he picket each animal in a separate place from dusk’s deepening till dawn’s first light. If some thieving redskins happened to stumble across them, far better was it to lose one or two than to have the whole bunch driven off together. Better to count those horses’ ribs than to count their tracks.

  As soon as Magpie was sleeping soundly on the far side of her mother, lying close at hand for those times when the child awoke hungry during the night, and Waits-by-the-Water was nestled beneath their blankets, Titus always slipped quietly into the frosty darkness. One by one he made the rounds, checking on the horses, then the mule, before bringing the buffalo pony with the spotted rump right into camp. Dropping a loop of rawhide rope around its head, Scratch played out the rest of the rope as he settled back among the blankets and robes with his wife and child. After tucking the end of the rope securely beneath his belt, the trapper could finally close his eyes, assured that he would be jolted awake with the pony’s slightest tug on the rawhide rope as it grazed through the night.

  A man who wanted to keep what he had left of his hair, who wanted to protect his family, didn’t much worry about sleeping out his nights in peace. He could sleep the night through come next summer’s rendezvous, or come this winter with the Crow. No man long in tooth, be he white or red, ever let a little thing like some lost sleep nettle him.

  Better to awaken after a few hours of sleep in fits and starts than not awaken at all.

  If it wasn’t Magpie fussing with an empty belly, or Samantha snorting to announce she had just winded some nocturnal animal like a raccoon, skunk, or porcupine, that awakened him, most times the trapper would come to, suddenly aware of some seminal change in the nightsounds drifting around their camp—even if it were nothing more than the rustle of an owl’s wings as it prowled on the hunt through the branches overhead or a change in the wind’s pitch as it soughed on down the valley below them. Season after season, the senses of those who hadn’t gone under became honed more finely, polished to clarity, become virtually instinctual.

  Too many times in these last nine years he had simply reacted, not given the luxury of a moment to plan, to consider and reflect on what course to take. Here he was alive after so many had tried to kill him simply because Ba
ss had absorbed the virtual wildness of this wilderness. The way of those beasts around him, that survival of the quickest, the most wary, those most cunning.

  He had survived in this wilderness where lesser men were swallowed up simply because he had become wild enough to reach across that gulf between man and beast.

  They had autumn beaver, a damned good start on what prime pelts he’d trap come spring. Maybe even do this winter what he hadn’t done in recent years—slip off for days at a time and search out those high country meadows and dammed streams where the beaver were laying out their winter safely burrowed in their lodges. A man could bust open the tops of those lodges, then shoot or spear the big flat-tails he caught inside. But those efforts always left a trapper with furs something less than prime—punctured by a gaping hole or two. Something that would pare down the price of his plews come rendezvous next summer.

  And with what he had seen of the high cost of necessaries coupled with the slide in the dollar that a man’s beaver could bring, Titus Bass didn’t figure he could chance anything else robbing him of what prime he had left among his plews.

  South of the Yellowstone River where the Crow would winter, down toward the Stinking Water around that region the trappers called Colter’s Hell, he was sure he could run onto some creeks and streams fed by warming springs, even those wider rivers where the banks bore plenty of beaver sign plain as paint and the water remained open throughout the cold months. A week of hard work here, and a week there, returning to the Crow camp to turn his hides over to his woman, nestle himself down in the robes with her naked, full-breasted warmth for a few days before he would set out again in search of another stretch of winter trapping.

  Sure sounded like it had the makings of some fine winter doings. He’d revisit his old friends among the Crow, stay off and on with Waits-by-the-Water and his in-laws … but when he got that old itch to be on the tramp again, why—he could pack up a mess of dried meat and pemmican before heading south with Samantha in search of brown gold.

  “Husband,” she called out, the word catching in her throat.

  She had seen the smoke a heartbeat before he spotted it. Down the slope to their left, rising among the last few leaves still clinging to those cottonwood branches—faint spirals of wood smoke. Bass imagined he could already smell its fragrance like a wispy perfume on the cold autumn wind gusting along the ground, kicking up icy streamers across the top of the most recent dusting of snow.

  “They are camped right where we believed we would find them,” he said with a smile. “Let’s ride on down there and show your family this little girl of ours.”

  5

  Arapooesh was dead.

  It slapped him with the same brutality he had experienced in losing Ebenezer Zane, Mad Jack Hatcher, even the canny old preacher Asa McAfferty.

  Rotten Belly simply wasn’t the sort who rode off half-cocked, spoiling for a fight, taking stupid chances. No, he had always been a warrior’s warrior, a prudent fighter who persisted in considering the odds and planning every detail of the battles he led against the enemy.

  But the Crow had many enemies, and they were strong. Rotten Belly’s mountain band of the Crow required a vigilant defense. For a man like Arapooesh that meant more than sending his young warriors into battle—it meant leading them himself.

  Rotten Belly had been killed in battle against the Blackfoot.

  Waits-by-the-Water’s parents welcomed them into their lodge that first night of celebration and homecoming. Grandmother and grandfather could not take their eyes and hands off little Magpie, playing and talking with the child until she grew hungry and ready for bed. Across the fire, Bass did his best to join in with their talk from time to time—but for the most part he sat silent, staring at the flames, listening to the crackle of wood and the wolfish wind howling without the buffalo-hide walls. He wondered on Rotten Belly’s spirit. Where it was on its journey. Would he have already reached the end of that long star road to spend out the rest of eternity with the likes of Zane, Hatcher, and McAfferty, even with all of those Arapooesh himself had killed in battle?

  That first night he awoke, fitful and damp. Slipping from beneath the blankets, Bass sat up in the dull red glow of the coals in the fire pit where he laid some small pieces of wood and watched the low flames till dawn when Magpie stirred, awakening her mother.

  “I must go away for a few days.”

  “We only arrived,” she said, lifting the baby to her breast.

  On the far side of the lodge her parents stirred. The old couple sat up, but remained silent in the dim light, curious. Waits stared at her husband’s gray face, his sleepless, red eyes, trying so hard to read something there that would allow her to understand.

  With his empty hands gesturing futilely before him, Bass said, “I must do something.”

  “Give yourself a few days to rest,” she pleaded. “You have worked so hard, been on the move ever since we left the place where all the white men gather.”

  Wagging his head in despair, Titus tried to explain. “I am torn. I do not want to leave you and Magpie—but something tells me I must be alone with this terrible news we were given last night.”

  “Is this your heart crying out in hurt for He-Who-Has-Died?” she asked, referring to the departed without speaking his name.

  Staring into the fire pit, he admitted, “Yes. I must go away to mourn for him—”

  “Stay and mourn for him here,” she begged, patting the blankets beside her. “Ever since last summer my people … his people have mourned for him in his own camp. It is good to shed the tears among others.”

  He crabbed closer to her, leaning against her shoulder. “My grief comes easy.”

  His wife’s parents stirred. Her father, Whistler, left their blankets to scoot next to the fire. His black hair had only recently begun to show the iron of his considerable winters. He said, “Mourning does not belong only to women.”

  Crane, her mother, added, “Tears should never frighten a strong man.”

  With her free arm Waits-by-the-Water pulled Bass’s brow against her cheek. “My father speaks good words. Your tears tell me you are a strong man, strong enough to show how much you miss He-Who-Has-Died.”

  “I raised my daughter to show her heart,” Whistler said. “But she must realize that we all grieve in our own way. If you believe you must ride into the hills to mourn, then that is where your spirit calls you to go.”

  Waits tried to speak for a moment, but ultimately admitted she was not going to convince her husband that he should stay. “I will miss you. Hurry back to us.”

  She turned away quickly, a gesture that tugged plaintively at his heart. Scratch knew she hoped to hide her face, those sad eyes, from him. He watched her back as she settled upon their blankets and gathered the baby to her breast.

  He laid a hand on her shoulder and said, “I have lost so many in my life, friends. I don’t want to lose you, lose even your love.”

  She laid her hand upon his, finally turning to gaze up at him, her eyes brimming, half-filled with tears. “When you left our camp two winters ago,” Waits-by-the-Water said, her voice no more than a choking whisper, “when you went away angry at me—I realized I never wanted to know that pain again.”

  “I don’t want to hurt—”

  “And when you went east to follow the trail of those who had cheated you … I vowed I would never let you leave me again. I promised myself that I would always go with you.”

  “Before you realize, I’ll be back,” he promised, watching the tears spill down her cheeks, drops she licked as they hung pendant from her upper lip.

  “I know,” she whispered, and squeezed his hand. “You must go to mourn the loss of another friend.”

  As his wife finished nursing Magpie, Titus Bass hurriedly lashed a blanket inside a single robe. He made certain he took a little tobacco and his own clay pipe, stuffing them deep into his possibles bag with his flint and steel. Seeing that his horn was filled with powder and his shooti
ng pouch weighed down with lead balls, Scratch stepped outside into the early light as Zeke leaped to all fours there beside the door.

  “C’mon, boy,” he whispered to the dog as he knelt, scratching its ears, gazing into the animal’s attentive eyes. “Let’s go fetch up Samantha.”

  With the mule, man and dog hurried back from the tiny corral where he had confined their stock. After cinching the riding saddle around her, he lashed his bedding behind the cantle, then ducked back inside the lodge.

  “I want you to take my pipe,” Whistler pleaded as he stepped up to the white man. “I smoked it when I grieved for my brother’s death. Now I want you to take it into the hills with you so you can offer your grief with it.”

  Eventually he took the pipe from Whistler’s hand suspended between them. “By giving me your pipe, you do me a great honor.”

  “By mourning my brother, your friend, in your own way, you do his family a great honor.”

  As the two men gripped one another’s forearms, Crane said, “Remember to drink water, or eat the snow. If you cut yourself in grief, you must drink water.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  Quietly Crane explained, “It is winter. You will need lots of water if your flesh weeps in sorrow too.”

  For a moment Bass looked at the two of them, then asked Whistler, “Where did you leave his body?”

  “South of here. Near the Grey Bull River. He-Who-Has-Died is lying in his lodge until his body returns to the earth and winds.”

  “Perhaps I will go look for this place where you left his lodge,” Bass replied, then heard the surprised squeak of air escape his wife’s throat.

  Turning to step up to Waits-by-the-Water, Titus vowed, “I will return when I have grieved for He-Who-Is-No-Longer-Here.”

  As Bass knelt to gather his wife in his arms, Magpie reached out to seize that single narrow braid he always wore at the right ear. Bass kissed his daughter, gently tugging her hand free of that bound hair. Then kissed his wife’s lips, long and lingering.