Ride the Moon Down

by Terry C. Johnston

  “The English turned him down, but a couple years back they made him agent on the upper Missouri for all these Injuns,” the big man declared.

  “That what brung him here?” Scratch demanded. “Something to do with the Injuns out here?”

  “Naw. Says he’s come here to buy out Bridger and the rest.”

  “B-buy ’em out?” Scratch sputtered in surprise. “With whose plews?”

  The tall man shrugged. “Sounds like it’s St. Louie French money.”

  “Damn if that don’t take the circle.” Turning to stare up into the younger man’s eyes, Titus said, “I see’d your face at many a ronnyvoo, round some fires, over at the trade tents. But I don’t recollect I ever caught your name.”

  “Shadrach Sweete,” the man replied. “And you’re Titus Bass.”

  “How you know me?”

  Sweete chuckled. “Hell, anyone runs with Jim Bridger’s brigade knows who Titus Bass is.”

  “But I ain’t never trapped with Gabe.”

  “Don’t matter,” Sweete replied. “I recollect how we run across you a time or two through the years. Ain’t that many of us been out here long as me or you have. ’Sides, Gabe thinks the world of you. Why, ever’ time he tells that story of you losing your ha’r, or how you run onto that red nigger years later … whoooeee! Them tales keep the greenhorns from sucking in a breath!”

  They laughed together; then Scratch asked, “You figger Fitz got his whiskey kegs open yet?”

  “I seen him crack ’em my own self,” Sweete said.

  “You think my word be good as plews with Fitz?”

  “Damn if it wouldn’t be better’n most.”

  Bass slapped the tall man on the back. “Then, what say you, Shadrach—let’s you and me go have us a drink of that saddle varnish these traders claim is whiskey!”

  Sweete struck him as a gentle man shoved down inside a grizzly bear’s body. A little taller than Joe Meek, and so wide of shoulder too that Scratch wondered if he could lay a hickory ax handle across that broad beam with no hickory left to hang off at either end.

  “Just like you, I come to the mountains myself in twenty-five,” Bass replied as one of the clerks poured out the whiskey into a pair of brand-new tin cups.

  “But I bet you wasn’t no fourteen-year-ol’t pup like I was in twenty-five!”

  Astonished by that admission, Titus asked, “How the hell you hire on with Gen’l Ashley when you was fourteen?”

  “Just lookit me, you cross-eyed idjit!” Sweete bellowed with a disarming smile, standing back to spread his arms. “Even as a pup—I was big for my age!”

  “You’re still a goddamned pup!” Titus growled at the man who stood a good half foot taller than he did and nudged something just shy of three hundred pounds.

  After a long moment of quiet Sweete sighed. “Where’s the beaver gone, Scratch?”

  He looked at the big man, then took another sip of his whiskey. “There’s beaver still, Shad. Up high. Back in a ways where no man’s yet gone. There’s beaver.”

  “They say the easy beaver’s been caught,” Sweete agreed. “Ah, shit—we’re on the downside of our trade, what with folks back east wanting silk hats.”

  “Beaver’s bound to rise, Shad,” he said with more hope than he felt. “Bound to rise.”

  “If it don’t—what the hell’m I gonna do?” the big man asked. “I come to trap beaver when I was fourteen. What the hell’m I s’posed to do when I can’t make a living no more trapping beaver?”

  “Let them others get all lathered up, run on back to what you run away from,” Bass said. “They just leave more beaver for niggers like you and me!”

  At the sharp ring of the voice they both turned and squinted into the sunlight washing over everything beyond that shady copse of trees. A lone rider galloped up, shouting.

  “The Nepercy! They’re fixing to come over with a parade!” the man huffed as the distant sound of drums first reached them. “Gonna show off front of them white women!”

  “I’ll bet that’ll be some!” Bass exclaimed, bolting to his feet and swilling down the last of his whiskey before handing the empty tin to Sweete. “Be off to fetch my wife and girl so they can see.”

  Zeke was straining at the end of his rope the moment Titus and his horse hoved into sight, yipping and prancing side to side, his big tail whipping mightily at the return of his master.

  “You’re gonna have to see this!” Scratch called as he kicked his right leg over and landed on both feet.

  He knelt as Magpie lumbered up toward him, clenching a well-moistened strip of dried meat she had been sucking on in one hand. He swept her into his arms and turned to his wife. “C’mon. Get your pony.”

  “Where are we going in such a hurry?”

  “Bet Magpie’s never see’d the Nepercy strut like prairie cocks. Likely you ain’t either.”

  He positioned the girl in front of the saddle before he stuffed a left foot into the stirrup and swung his leg over, settling her onto his lap as he came down into the saddle. “Here,” he said to his daughter, wrapping her tiny hands around the thick látigo leather. “You hol’t on to the reins with me.”

  Waits came up beside them, leading her pony. When she had leaped onto its bare back, she asked, “Why are the Pierced Noses making a procession?”

  “They want to show off for the white women.”

  He watched how that suddenly soured the expression on her face.

  “For the white women,” she repeated. “Now the Pierced Noses are gone strange in the head for the white women.”

  Titus leaned over and gripped her forearm sympathetically. “Don’t think nothing of it. Just wanted you and Magpie to see the show.”

  For a moment Waits gazed at her daughter’s cheerful face, then said, “Yes. Let’s go see the show these Pierced Noses put on for the white women.”

  As it turned out, all four tribes eagerly joined in the grand procession as it worked its way toward the site where the missionary women were camped. By the time Scratch and Waits dismounted and tied off their ponies, the front ranks of the march were approaching. Having started their ride at the west end of the valley, the Snake and Bannock passed through the Flathead camp, then the Nez Perce village, sweeping up more and more participants until some four hundred yelling, chanting, shrieking warriors boiled up and down the sides of the parade column.

  Stripped as if for the hunt, they wore no more than their breechclout and moccasins, many painted with vivid colors, tying birds and feathers in their hair, wearing the skullcaps of wolves, badgers, even buffalo upon their heads. Shaking lances strewn with the scalp locks taken from vanquished enemies, the horsemen strutted as proudly as any war hero might. Old men rode stately at the center of the march, singing their battle songs as they beat on hand drums or shook buffalo-bladder rattles filled with stream-bottom pebbles. Younger men who had taken no scalps brandished their bows or war clubs or fusils, to which they had tied long strips of red and blue cloth to flutter in the summer breeze.

  Within a nearby copse of trees, Captain William Drummond Stewart and Bridger assured Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding that this noisy, bellicose charge was every bit as harmless as the charge made on them by the trappers racing out to meet the caravan. Both wives appeared at the flaps of their tall conical tent sewn of bed ticking and large enough to comfortably sleep all seven of the missionaries. But the moment pale and sickly Eliza Spalding spied the approach of the screaming warriors, she emitted a pained yelp, slapped a hand over her mouth, and turned on her heel—disappearing back into the sanctuary of her tent.

  “Curse these godless savages for their nakedness!” the prim and proper one shrieked in horror as she ducked from sight.

  But Narcissa Whitman of the twinkling blue eyes and ready smile clapped her hands together with glee before hurrying on her husband’s arm to the edge of the meadow to watch the approach of that cavalcade assembled in honor of the missionaries.

  Closer and closer the warri
ors came, growing noisier, shrieking louder as they drew near until the front ranks spotted the holy man’s fair-haired wife. Like the reflex of a muscle, they put their ponies to the gallop, shouting anew as they raced toward that bed-ticking tent, shaking weapons and feathers, scalps and coup-sticks, tearing out and around, leaping again and again over clumps of gray and green sage, spurts of yellowish dust flaring from every flying hoof. When no more than ten yards away, the first chiefs in the parade suddenly swept to the side without slowing in the slightest, careening their snorting, wide-eyed ponies in a maddening loop that took them entirely around the tall conical tent held fast to the prairie with wooden stakes.

  Now more than four hundred warriors raced in a crude oval round and round the campsite as Narcissa laughed and clapped and spun with the excitement and color of it all, made immensely happy at this exhibition in her honor. At first a few warriors, then more, reined up in a spray of dust and dismounted, walking their ponies over to examine the Dearborn carriage the missionaries had succeeded in bringing all the way from the States. Outside and in they inspected it, some even crawling in the grass beneath the carriage to get themselves a complete study of it. Others rubbed the top, dragged their fingers across the soft leather-covered horsehair-stuffed seats, or repeatedly picked up and dropped, picked up and dropped the double-tree that harnessed the carriage to a single horse.

  “Waits-by-the-Water!”

  They both turned to find Narcissa and her husband approaching with quite a crowd in tow. The doctor’s wife called out the Crow woman’s name again just as they came to a halt before the trapper.

  “Please tell your wife it is so good to see her again,” Narcissa exclaimed. “I was hoping to before we depart for Oregon country.”

  Bass translated and Waits nodded self-consciously.

  “Mr. Bass,” Marcus Whitman began, “my wife and I would like to invite you and your family to have dinner with us tomorrow evening. If that isn’t convenient, we’ll make it the night after.”

  “No, ’morrow evening will set just fine by us, Doctor.”

  “Good,” and Whitman smiled genuinely. “Tomorrow it is.”

  Narcissa took a step forward, reaching up to touch Magpie’s bare foot as she sat on her father’s shoulders. Then she took up Waits-by-the-Water’s hand and squeezed it, smiling with her whole face. Together she and her husband turned and moved once more into the crowd that inched its way back to that conical tent of blue-striped bed ticking.

  “Tomorrow,” Waits repeated after they had started back for their ponies.

  “Won’t it be fun for you and Magpie too?”

  “Yes,” she answered in English, then turned to face him fully after he lifted Magpie from his shoulders and set her atop his saddle.

  Waits-by-the-Water took his empty hand and caressed the fingers gently, looking into his eyes as she said, “It will be a good night to celebrate our happy news.”

  “What happy news?”

  She laid his hand on her belly, pressing it there as she had done once before. “Ti-tuzz … you are going to be a father again.”

  15

  A father again?

  Why … he had a grown daughter back in St. Lou, a woman herself, old enough to give him grandchildren.

  This momentous news, all tangled up in his blissful ignorance of how a woman came to be with child, purely confounded Titus. While most of his fiber rejoiced at his wife’s happiness, there was nonetheless a narrow but hardy spider’s thread of baffled wonderment and befuddled concern for the health of a child born of so old a father.

  Not that such a thing was so rare in his family; why, at the time his grandpap was born, his great-grandpap was fifty-two! Though Titus never knew the man, he had indeed known his grandpap, hale and hearty, every bit as lean as whipcord and tough as sun-dried rawhide till that fated evening he had told his wife he figured it was time for him to accept God’s rest and took to his bed. There he had closed his eyes as if to sleep, slipping away to his mortal rest before morn.

  His grandpap’s was truly the first dying Titus had ever witnessed, but far from the last his eyes were to behold. Times were Scratch had fervently prayed God would grant him a passing every bit as much at peace as his grandpap’s had been. Each time, however, he would realize that simply wasn’t the way of a man’s seasons out here in this big yonder.

  Would folks be awestruck that this man the color and toughness of a lean strop of saddle leather could still father a babe? Would a great number of them stare all mule-eyed and wag their heads in judgment while some would snigger behind their hands when they learned he was going to be a father again?

  In the end he supposed these things did not matter—none of those fears or doubts, and surely none of what others thought of him. He was reminded that the way of such things wasn’t his to decide, but the doing of something far greater. Not his, but God’s. When a man and woman coupled, then Bass figured God eventually saw fit to give them a young’un. As surely as Jim Bridger’s wife was now heavy with child.

  He glanced over at Cora again as the shadows deepened, finding her still reluctant to join her husband and the others at the missionaries’ fire. Instead, the young Flathead princess stood in the shadows behind Bridger, not saying a word, nor joining in the lighthearted talk and bantering laughter. Titus figured she, like Waits-by-the-Water, had grown dismayed by the way the white men acted so differently around the white women.

  Maybe later he should pull Gabe off to the side and remind him to assure Cora that he still loved her.

  All in all, he had explained to his own wife, it was natural the way the trappers grew so adolescent or fiddle-footed around the white women. Natural because Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding reminded these men of loved ones left far behind in the States. Perhaps a lost love who had broken a young man’s heart; maybe a beloved older sister or auntie. Or perhaps an adored mother who had always smiled and caressed and wiped away a little boy’s tears.

  Natural for a white man to act somewhat childish around those white women, he had explained to his wife, since those white women reminded a man of those he had once loved a lifetime long ago.

  After a supper of mountain mutton and elk tenderloin, sliced with their belt knives and eaten using forks made from peeled, forked twigs, Sir William Drummond Stewart opened some of his treasures and brought out more of the exquisite and exotic foods he had packed to the mountains from last winter’s sojourn in New Orleans. Besides the savory selections of game, the Scotsman had provided his guests with a sampling of sardines and cured ham packed in newfangled airtight tins. For dessert he had prepared platters heaped with a variety of dried fruits, green mango pickles brought from Caribbean islands, and a butter-colored marmalade made from Seville oranges shipped all the way from Spain.

  “Why do you suppose there is such unhappiness on Cora’s face?” Titus asked his wife in Crow as Stewart’s servant made the rounds with a coffeepot.

  For a long moment she gazed at the pregnant Flathead woman. “Among my people a woman lives a step behind her husband.”

  “That does not tell me why Cora looks sad and angry at the same time.”

  With a sigh Waits explained. “Don’t you see? Her husband is talking too much to the white woman, laughing with her. Maybe Cora thinks her husband would be happier with a white woman for a wife.”

  “Because the women are from the same people we are?”

  For a moment Waits pursed her lips, considering. “Maybe because this husband doesn’t talk so much to his wife, doesn’t laugh so much with her as he does with the white woman. Perhaps Cora thinks there is something only you whites understand, something we wives will never share with our white husbands.”

  “So this fear can hurt a woman’s heart?”

  “Yes,” she answered, gazing fully at him as he took the sleeping child from her arms and cradled Magpie in his. “If Cora married one of her own people, they would talk more, maybe even laugh more together too.”

  “Like
we laugh?”

  She smiled. “Yes, like us. But not all white men are like you, Ti-tuzz.”

  He still found that it tickled him each time she stuck her own English pronunciation of his name at the tail end of all her Crow.

  As he sat there watching the guests, glancing too at the dejected Cora, Scratch figured he couldn’t blame the booshways and trappers from fluttering around the woman. Not only was Narcissa Whitman a treat for the eyes, but she did her best to put them at ease around her, from the highest of company partners to the lowliest of skin trappers. It continued to amuse him how, after more than two days, these hardened mountaineers who annually bought or traded for squaws with carnal abandon were suddenly acting like bashful little boys, or performing like strutting, overconfident adolescents suffering their first schoolhouse crush around Narcissa Whitman.

  “So did Black Harris tell you all about my peetreefied forest on your way west, ma’m?” Bridger asked the missionary.

  Titus grinned and sipped at his coffee, amused to know what was coming.

  “No, not rightly, Mr. Bridger,” Narcissa replied. “Each night around the fire Mr. Harris did tell us many a story on our way across the plains. But he claimed he dared not tell any of your stories because no one could do it better than you.”

  Bridger glanced up at Harris, pilot for that year’s supply train, and winked. “Why, thankee, Black.”

  “G’won and tell the lady ’bout your forest, Gabe,” Harris instructed. “I told her: good as I was at spinning a yarn, Jim Bridger still be the champeen spinner.”

  Grinning, Bridger took a sip of his coffee, then set down his cup as his eyes danced over the five greenhorns from the States. Then he began his tale by explaining how he and his brigade came to find themselves in a new stretch of country up near Blackfoot territory. Gabe told how he was out hunting when he came across some game birds singing sweetly in the trees.

  “Pulling down my sights on one, I fixed to shoot it in the head, so I wouldn’t ruin the meat,” he declared. “And I did just that, shot the damn bird’s head right off—excuse my language, ma’m.”