Ride the Moon Down

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Scratch, is it?” Stewart repeated with a wry smile. “I believe I’ve heard your name come up among some of your American compatriots. Perhaps Bridger himself mentioned you.”

  “Me and Gabe go back some,” Titus declared. “Run onto him clear back to twenty-six.”

  With a look of warm approval filling his kind eyes, Stewart cast his gaze upon the woman and that young child she clutched against her side. “And this is your wife? What tribe is she—wait. Let me see if I can guess by her clothing.” He considered a moment, studying Waits-by-the-Water up and down, then finally wagging his head. “I’m not sure, but suppose she might be Shoshone?”

  “Naw, she’s Crow.”

  “Crow!” Stewart clapped his hands together exuberantly. “I haven’t had much acquaintance with the Crow in my travels, even the journey I made through a corner of their country. But come, come! All of you.” He pointed to some ladder-back wooden chairs arranged around the fire. “Let’s sit and talk away the evening.”

  Stepping behind one of the chairs, Stewart gripped its back and looked at Waits with a broad smile.

  “He wants you to sit on it,” Bass explained in Crow, unable to come up with a word for chair.

  “Sit?”

  “Among the white men, this is how they sit. They have many chairs.”

  She regarded the piece of furniture suspiciously, then glanced at Stewart, and down at the chair again. “Why sit on this—when they can sit on the ground, can sit on a blanket or robe?”

  “Don’t make much sense, just like a lot the white man does. But”—and he shrugged—“white folks partial to this way of sitting. Go on, sit—and we’ll be good guests for this visitor from a land far, far away.”

  After she had settled, Bass and Stewart took their seats as a half-breed servant stepped up with a silver tray on which rested four large pewter goblets.

  The nobleman took his from the tray as the half-breed stepped between Bass and the Crow woman. “Try this, Scratch. It’s a very nice wine I brought with me. If you shouldn’t like it, we can find you something else to drink.”

  As it turned out, Waits enjoyed the taste of her first glass so quickly that Bass had to warn her the white man’s powerful drink might either make her sick or cause her to act like the trappers she had seen become silly fools after guzzling at rendezvous.

  “You’ve covered some ground, William,” Bass declared later as the half-breed attendant poured steaming coffee in china mugs after an elegant supper of elk tenderloin garnished with canned oysters and slabs of a tart cheese on the side. He had never seen Waits-by-the-Water eat near as much as she did once Magpie was nursed and laid to sleep on a blanket spread beside her chair.

  “You said you’ve been out to Vancouver. So you must have met Doctor McLoughlin?”

  “That ol’ white-headed eagle? Sure did. A good man—even for a Britisher.”

  “Lord, he’s not a Britisher!” Stewart corrected. “He was born in Canada. Which might explain why he might well share no more love for the crown than do I.”

  “You’re Scots, are you?”

  “Not a drop of John Bull in me,” Stewart said proudly.

  Scratch sipped at his coffee, then said, “My grandpap allays told us we was Scot too—leastways, back some in the family.”

  At that Stewart hoisted his tin cup and merrily proposed, “Welcome to the tartan, my friend!”

  “You said you been far yonder to the west, and clear up to Fort Union at the mouth of the Yallerstone,” Scratch declared. “How far south you been? See’d Bents’ Fort?”

  “Indeed I did. Spring of thirty-four. We came north after a winter sojourn in Sante Fe—”

  “Jehoshaphat! We was close by ourselves—down to Taos that winter!” Titus exclaimed. “That’s where our li’l Magpie was born. I first come through Bents’ Fort that spring of thirty-four too, on my way back from St. Lou.”

  “We visited Taos a few days on our way north for rendezvous on Ham’s Fork,” Stewart declared. “Quite an undertaking the Bent brothers have assumed with their fortress, not unlike the construction of this post. Back in Scotland, I’ll have you know, my brother is building himself a new castle. Murthly he’s calling it.”

  “What brung you all the way out here?” Scratch inquired after draining his mug. “All the yondering you’ve done, from the Missouri to the Columbia and on down to the greaser diggings—that’s a passel of tramping.”

  For a moment Stewart ruminated on the question while he gazed into the fire, the thump of distant drums softly floating across the open meadow from the villages that lay beyond.

  “I’m not the firstborn of my family, you see, Scratch. Among the wealthy, landed class that means I must make my own way in the world, unlike my brother John. Were it not for my gracious and loving aunts, I would still be making a career for myself in the British army. I was a captain—and I suppose it was my service in the wars of our empire that first stabbed me with this incurable appetite for travel and adventure.”

  “Adventure—damned sure to get your fill of that out here!” Titus replied.

  “So in turn I’ll ask you the same question: what brings you here?” Stewart inquired, his eyes intently studying the American. “Come for the beaver?”

  Wagging his head, Scratch answered, “Some time back I realized it ain’t the beaver. There’s some what come for the plews, but that ain’t what makes a man stay.”

  Stewart sighed, gazing now into the flames. “You Americans have something here in this country of yours that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world.” He peered up at Bass. “Something that doesn’t even exist back east, back there in the rest of America.”

  Bass shook his head emphatically now. “But I don’t callate how this here’s the United States, William. It ain’t like nothing else back there. Another land, this.”

  The Scotsman abruptly raised his cup. “Huzzah! Huzzah! Here’s my toast that this country out here will never become anything like that country back east!”

  With a stab of some sudden, undefinable pain sending its icy finger through the middle of his chest, Scratch gazed at the black night sky and replied, “Aye, I damn well pray this never will be anything like that land they ruin’t back east.”

  * Dance on the Wind

  * Today’s Laramie Range, not the mountains in present-day South Dakota, which after the era of the mountain man would come to be known as the Black Hills during the great Indian wars.

  12

  Perhaps it was all for the best that his brother-in-law hated him for his white skin, loathed him because he was not Crow.

  Bass looked over the party slowly passing by the fort on their way to one of those small clusters of buffalo-hide lodges that dotted the south bank of the North Platte. In the lead rode a white trapper resplendent in his leggings and war shirt, the unfurled wings of a black-and-white magpie adorning his bear-hide cap. Behind him on her own prized pony rode his first wife. To her right sat a child so young the boy’s legs barely reached over the wide back of his small pony. And behind them came a woman who had to be another wife followed by her own three children on their horses. Perhaps a widowed sister of the trapper’s first wife. At least ten or more riders brought up the rear of that slow procession. Old ones and young, male and female both, some goading travois horses with their peeled switches, poles kicking up hot streamers of dust that hung in the still morning air.

  When a man took an Indian woman for his wife, he married her whole damned family. That meant promising to provide for his new kin. Clearly, that poor trapper had wanted a wife and had ended up with the responsibility of close to twenty of her relatives.

  Scratch turned to Waits-by-the-Water with a grin. “I just decided it’s a good thing your brother hates me.”

  “But Strikes-in-Camp gives my mother a home,” she said. “If he is killed, there will be no one but me to care for her now with my father and uncle gone.”

  “When that time comes, you and I will see that she i
s warm, that she has food for her belly,” he vowed.

  “My mother will not be a burden on you?”

  He bent and kissed her cheek, then said, “I have no others, so your family is my family. We will take care of our own.”

  “But you do have family, husband,” she reminded him. “The daughter who stays among the white men, to the east.”

  “Yes,” he fondly remembered Amanda. “I have a grown daughter. A woman by now, she probably has given me a grandchild or two.”

  “But this child,” Waits said, handing Magpie to her father, “she is your daughter too.”

  “How about that!” he said to the little one with a grin as they continued toward the fort gate. “A man old enough to have grandchildren of his own has been blessed by the First Maker with you, my beautiful child. Let’s take your mother inside to find something so pretty she can’t live without it.”

  Fort William’s trading room was a long, narrow affair, with a plank counter running down the entire length of it. The company employees reached the area behind that counter through a door that passed into a storeroom. Directly behind the three clerks rose a solid wall of shelves and cubbyholes stuffed with goods and spanning the entire length of the room, a display that extended all the way from the ceiling overhead to the bottom shelf, which served as a second narrow counter about as high as a man’s waist. From there down, the wide openings were stuffed with bales of folded blankets, small kegs of powder, along with bolts of coarse and fine cloth.

  For a moment the two of them stopped there in the cool shade of that September afternoon while the clerks attended to other visitors. Bass watched his wife’s face as her eyes slowly climbed up the extent of the shelves, in utter awe of the grand display. She had seen a few of the white man’s trade goods laid out in display at the last three annual rendezvous they had attended, but most of the items were always kept back in crates and bundles and bales, covered with sheets of canvas to protect them from dust or a fickle summer thunderstorm. Here everything could be taken in at once—all of it on display, right out in the open. Each item lay little more than an arm’s length away, just beyond a person’s fingertips. Taunting, luring, entirely seductive.

  Where to begin, he wondered.

  “Lemme see your finger rings and bracelets,” Bass replied when a clerk moved over to ask what he could do for the trapper.

  With a noisy clunk the young employee dropped a large, three-foot-square, wooden tray atop the counter. Narrow dividers partitioned the huge tray into sections where lay a glittering array of brass and copper rings, bracelets and necklaces, silver gorgets and dangly earrings, ivory brooches and other large decorative pins fashioned in the shape of sea serpents, winged dragons, snakes, and peacocks displaying their finest plumage.

  Slightly breathless, Waits turned to ask her husband, “M-may I touch them?”

  “Touch them all you want.”

  “You trading pelts?” inquired the clerk as the woman picked up some earrings to examine.

  “They’re back to our camp,” Scratch explained. “When she figgers what geegaws she’s took a shine to, I’ll have you put ’em back for me so I can go fetch my plews.”

  One by one Waits chose those items that most caught her fancy. Eventually she took a step back from the counter and the tray, raising her eyes to her husband with a smile. “These are the prettiest.”

  “You want these?”

  “For me, and for Magpie—yes.”

  Turning to the clerk, Scratch asked, “How much?”

  Computing the cost, the man announced his total.

  “Forty dollar?” Bass shrieked. “So what’s plew by pound?”

  “Dollar a pound for prime.”

  He gulped. “And you dress it down from there?”

  “It ain’t prime, it don’t bring a dollar,” the clerk explained.

  “Damn,” he sighed. “Prices ain’t no better here’n they are to ronnyvoo.”

  A second clerk stepped up to ask, “You figgered to cut yourself a better deal here?”

  “I did,” Bass admitted. “Ain’t never see’d prices so high, never see’d beaver drop so low.”

  “Dollar worth the same here as it is on the upper Missouri,” the second man declared. “The company sets what we charge for goods at ever’ post. And they say what we give for furs.”

  “Beaver’s on a slide,” the first clerk said, starting to scoop up the brass, copper, and silver jewelry into one hand.

  Scratch snagged the man’s wrist in his hand. “Hol’t on. Don’ put those away just yet. Forty dollar, you said.”

  “Yep.”

  “And a dollar a pound for beaver.”

  The first man repeated, “Be it prime.”

  “Damn if that don’t cut deep,” Scratch grumbled, staring down at the jewelry spread across a square of black calico dotted with tiny yellow, red, and blue flowers.

  “You got any buffler robes?” asked the second clerk.

  “Trade for them too, eh?” Scratch commented.

  “They’re bringing better money than most anything right now,” the man explained. “Just figgered you might have some robes, what with the woman here.”

  “We got robes for damn sure,” he told them. “But them robes keep us warm through the winter. Can’t sell ’em off.”

  As he started to amble away down the counter toward a man just come through the door, the second clerk advised, “You decide to sell those Injun robes, we’ll give you good dollar on ’em.”

  Pursing his lips with resentment, Bass nudged the jewelry toward the first clerk. There was no way he could bear to see her face, that disappointment in her eyes if they walked away without that foofaraw.

  “Keep all them shinies for me,” he ordered. “I’ll be back with ’nough plews to pay you your forty dollar a’fore you can finish your coffee.”

  Returning Waits and Magpie to their camp beside the Laramie River, Bass untied the rawhide ropes looped around one of the last two packs of furs. Whacking the dust from them the way his mam used to smack the dirt from their cabin rugs, he quickly sorted the pelts, selecting twenty of his best. They should easily bring more than the forty dollars it would take to trade for those geegaws.

  Returning to the fort alone, he flung the small bundle atop the end of the counter and waited for the clerk to finish with another customer. Eventually, the man pulled out fifteen of the pelts, laying them beneath one arm of a scale. Quickly adding weights to the other arm, the man found that he had to remove one of the pelts.

  With a sigh he turned back to Titus. “I can get ’er down to forty-two dollars.”

  “For the differ’nce gimme one of your best-looking glasses and the rest in your newest ’baccy. None of that ol’ stuff.”

  “That ain’t gonna get you much in tobacco, mister.”

  “Just treat me fair and we’ll call it even,” he said, taking up the ends of the rawhide rope he knotted around the plews left on the counter. “Fella don’t stand a chance no more,” he groused. “Appears your company is the only outfit trading in the mountains and at them posts in the upcountry. No good when you run all the other traders out.”

  “Our company ain’t the only ones in the mountain trade,” protested the second clerk who had sauntered over to rest his elbows on the counter.

  “I know,” Scratch said miserably. “I been to that fort the Bents got—but it’s a piece of riding, way down on the Arkansas.”

  “It ain’t the only one,” the first clerk explained as he spread the small square of black calico on the counter.

  “I don’t figger on riding all the way north to your Fort Union neither.”

  “So I s’pose you ain’t heard,” the second man confided. “News come in the other day. We just heard some folks is raising a small post down on the South Platte a ways.”

  “South Platte,” Titus echoed. “And it ain’t your company’s post?”

  “Don’t belong to us,” the first man said. “We hear it belongs to one of B
illy Sublette’s brothers.”

  “Him and his partner, Louie Vaskiss, was here with Campbell last spring,” the second one explained. “I figger the two of ’em are throwing in together, what with big brother Sublette and Campbell calling it quits for the mountains.”

  Titus tied up the four corners of the calico scrap and stuffed it into his possibles pouch. With a pat on the flap he told the clerks, “Thankee, fellas. For the geegaws, and for laying out the trail sign on that new post.”

  “You gonna head that way?”

  Nodding, he replied, “Figgered to do some trapping south of here anyway.”

  “Good luck to you,” the second man cheered.

  “Thankee—but after all these winters I know luck ain’t got much to do with me saving what I got left for ha’r,” Scratch declared. “Hard work, never giving up, and good friends … they been what keeps this nigger’s stick afloat through the years.”

  “Of all the mistakes I have made in my life,” Sir William Drummond Stewart explained as darkness fell and the stars came out around them, “only two do I truly regret. All the rest I have atoned for, corrected.”

  This last evening prior to Fitzpatrick’s departure for St. Louis, the Scottish nobleman had invited Bass to join him and a few guests for a final dinner before setting off for the east come morning. As soon as the sun fell, the air took on a new quality, growing crisp and chill, enough that he welcomed the fire’s warmth and the coffee that steamed in his cups.

  While the conversation among Stewart’s guests had remained cheery and buoyant for some time, as the night wore on the nobleman grew more pensive.

  “A child don’t get to be our age ’thout making his share of mistakes,” Bass reflected, sensing how the host was down in his mind. “Measure of a man is what he learns from the times he’s stumbled and snagged his foot.”

  “Why do you say that, Titus?”

  Shrugging, Scratch replied, “Don’t seem like you’re here. What’s eating your craw?”

  “I’m sorry,” Stewart said, then turned to Marcus Whitman, saying, “I apologize, Doctor—and to the rest of you too. Perhaps I am brooding at the realization that with the morrow I will be abandoning these mountains, this western country where I have spent these past three summers, as well as that one winter at the mouth of the Columbia. I’ve hunted for and shot every big-game animal in this wilderness, including grizzly and elk, antelope and bighorn, mountain goat and more than my share of buffalo. More times than I can count I’ve stood shoulder to shoulder with you mountaineers, taking part in at least a dozen skirmishes with the redskin natives.”