As those first ranks of Blackfoot emerged from the swirling, icy mist downriver, several of the trappers cursed. Two hundred yards. More and ever more filed behind them. It had to be just as Bridger pronounced. A thousand. Mayhaps even more than a thousand. The enemy ranks filled the wide riverbed from bank to bank, trudging toward the white man’s fortress on foot through the snow, using the Yellowstone’s unobstructed frozen surface to make their approach.
“This be the day, boys!” Bridger bellowed.
“Take some of them niggers with you!”
All around Bass the trappers were screwing up their resolve now—yelling at one another with that sort of encouragement doomed men give to friends and comrades as the end looms near. At the center of the breastworks the trappers’ squaws began to keen quietly, the young half-breed children whimpering pitifully.
“Hell is where I’ll send as many as I can!” Shad roared.
Popping a half-dozen lead balls into his mouth for the coming fight, Titus vowed, “By God, I’ll see my share in hell a’fore noon!”
On the Blackfoot came. At the center of that first column walked a figure in a heavy white wool blanket, wearing a headdress constructed of numberless white ermine skins to which had been attached polished buffalo horns. Attached to the narrow cord of sinew between the horn tips was a single eagle feather that trembled on each wisp of cold breeze.
No more were any of the Blackfoot hidden by the fog. Now the whole of them paraded in full view of the white men waiting behind the bulwark of their brush fort. What an impressive sight they made: their faces clearly painted, feathers and scalps streaming from lances, bows, and shields, war clubs and rifles at the ready.
“You ever faced anything like this?” Meek asked.
“Shit.” And Bass shook his head. “I ain’t ever see’d this many Blackfoot in one place a’fore.”
Then, just beyond a hundred yards, the one in the white blanket waved an arm, shouting something to those around him, and that first rank of warriors turned aside. Slogging onto the snowy bank, they pushed on through the brush until they reached the open prairie as the wind kicked up old snow around their ankles and calves.
“You figger ’em to work around us, Gabe?” Ebbert hollered.
“I can’t figger ’em for nothing,” Bridger answered. “No telling what they’re about.”
It did indeed mystify the trappers to watch the succeeding ranks of the warriors follow the first. Instead of some going this way while others went that in what Scratch had assumed would be their attempt to surround the breastworks, the Blackfoot all followed the one in the white blanket. Eventually the entire war party had abandoned the frozen river for the open prairie more than a hundred yards from where the trappers stood waiting the attack.
By then the first warriors to reach that open ground were starting to sit. As the hundreds arrived in waves, they too settled into the snow around their leaders, forming a huge council circle in that open-air amphitheater.
“Don’t that take the chalk!” Scratch cried.
“What you callate they’re up to, Gabe?” Sweete asked.
“Can’t say as I know,” Bridger replied.
“Yellow-backed sonsabitches!” Bass flung his voice over the breastworks at the enemy.
Suddenly emboldened, other trappers began to taunt the Blackfoot. “You’re women!”
“Cowards!”
“Can’t fight us like real men!”
Titus screamed with the others, “You ain’t got no manhood!”
“Come on and fight!” Sweete bellowed.
Louder and louder the white men became in their insults. But still the Blackfoot remained in their huge war council just beyond rifle range.
“You want we should fire some bullets at ’em?” Squire Ebbert inquired.
“Just a waste for now,” Bridger declined.
Scratch agreed, “You’ll need your lead soon enough, boys.”
“Damn,” Sweete growled, “I’ll bet there ain’t one of them niggers knows any American talk.”
“Too bad they can’t unnerstand what we’re calling ’em,” Meek added.
With a grin Bass passed his rifle off to Osborne Russell. “Hold this for me.”
“What you fixing to do?” Russell asked.
Turning to Meek and Sweete, Scratch gave instructions, “You two ’bout the biggest niggers there is out in these here mountains. Both of you pull aside some of that brush wall over there.”
“What the hell for?” Meek demanded.
“Them Blackfoots don’t speak no American, so they don’t unnerstand us, right?”
“Right,” Sweete replied, still mystified.
“So I’m gonna talk to ’em in sign so they damn well know what I think of ’em.”
“Shit,” Bridger grumbled, “they too far off! None of them red niggers gonna see you talking in hand sign!”
Smiling hugely now, Scratch shook his head and said, “Them bastards bound to see my sign, Gabe!”
“C’mon, Joe!” Sweete cried, bolting away. “Help me pull this here brush back!”
The moment the two of them had muscled the logs and branches apart, Scratch lunged through. Right behind him Meek and Sweete popped through the narrow opening as every last one of the trappers surged to that wall to have themselves a good vantage point to watch Bass’s “sign making.”
Instead of stopping just outside the breastworks, Scratch kept right on going, halting only after he was more than ten yards beyond the wall—alone and in the open, where he began to attract the attention of those warriors on the outer flank of the council.
Emerging from the breastworks empty-handed, the lone white man unbuckled his belt and flung it to the ground beside him, then yanked off his elk-hide coat. Spinning about in the swirling ground-snow to face the fortress again, Bass dropped the coat and dragged up the long tail of his war shirt, tugging aside the blue wool breechclout to expose his rump. With one cold bare hand he slapped the faded wool longhandles.
From afar came the first shouts of fury. He was certain they understood his sign.
“Come kiss my ass, you yellow dogs!” he screamed as he bent over, staring between his legs at the Blackfoot. “Come kiss my ass!”
Behind Titus, both Meek and Sweete were doubled over, roaring with laughter. At the walls of the brush fort, every one of those sixty-some trappers were screaming at the Blackfoot now, many gasping for breath as they guffawed and yelled, guffawed and bellowed some more. This was damn well about as much fun as a man could have before he went under.
When his rump and bare hands grew numb from the terrible cold, Bass finally stood, wheeled about, and raised the front tail of his war shirt, grabbing his crotch.
“This here’s a man!” he shrieked at the enemy. “You ain’t got a pecker like me ’cause you’re all women!”
“Women afraid to fight!” Sweete cried behind him.
Eventually Titus picked his coat out of the snow, buckling the belt around it, then turned again, bent over, and gave his rump one last slap before he slowly trudged back to the breastworks—accompanied by the hoots and hollers and uproarious cheers of those sixty-one other men.
At the walls Meek and Sweete slapped him on the shoulders, teary-eyed, they were laughing so hard. “Up with him!” Shad ordered.
With that the two of them firmly seized the smaller man and hoisted Titus high into the air. Confused for a moment, Bass thrashed as Meek and Sweete stepped directly under him, settling the skinny man atop their shoulders where he caught his balance.
The cheering grew even louder as two dozen more emerged from that narrow gap in the breastworks, pushing back on it to carve an entrance wide enough for those who carried Bass aloft. Many of the trappers were already growing hoarse from shouting and laughing so lustily in the dry cold air, surging around Meek and Sweete, some bending over and slapping their own rumps to copy how Bass had taunted the enemy.
Back inside the breastworks, Sweete and Meek started around in
a wide circle, still carrying Titus on their shoulders, when Bridger suddenly hollered above the clamor.
“Someone’s fat is in the fire, boys!”
The noise ended abruptly and Scratch leaped to the snow, hurrying to the wall with the others.
The warriors were parting slightly, allowing that warrior in the white blanket to step through their numbers. Halfway between the Blackfoot and the breastworks he came to a halt and began to wave his arms.
First one, then another, of the white men translated the chief’s gestures.
“Says they ain’t gonna fight!”
“Can’t fight us today.”
More signs were made.
“Gonna go back to his village now!”
Shaking his head in wonder, Scratch reflected, “You s’pose them Blackfoot figgered that red sky over their camp was bad medicine for ’em?”
Sweete snorted with a gust of raw mirth and said, “It sure weren’t your skinny ass what scared ’em off!”
As the white men watched in fascination, the chief turned aside and started across the bottom ground for the slopes bordering the valley, starting west for the Three Forks of the Missouri. At the same time less than half of the warriors began to move away in the opposite direction, marching downriver to the east.
“That bunch ain’t going back home,” Meek commented sourly.
“This gotta be a trick,” Ebbert said.
“We’ll wait ’em out and see,” Bridger declared.
A few minutes later, as the last of the Blackfoot were disappearing around a bend in the Yellowstone, Sweete came up and threw his arm around Bass’s shoulder. “You scared ’em off with that bony ass of your’n, Scratch.”
Thin-lipped and melancholy, Bass wagged his head. He pointed downriver. “Not that bunch, Shad. They ain’t running off for home. Them niggers is making for Crow country.”
20
Not trusting the Blackfoot any farther than he could throw one, Jim Bridger had his brigade maintain their vigilant watch across the next three days, wary that the enemy would lay a trap for the unsuspecting whites. Then, on the fourth day, Bridger called for a small detachment of volunteers to venture from their breastworks and reconnoiter the surrounding countryside for sign of the war party.
Joe Meek, Kit Carson, and the others returned at twilight to report they hadn’t seen a warrior. But what they had found sure made them grateful those northern lights had spooked the Blackfoot.
“Joe’s the one with some proper learning, so he ciphered it out,” Carson explained. “When we come across all them war lodges that bunch had downriver, we could make out how each one was big enough to hold least ten men. Meek went to counting straightaway … and he tallied up enough of them timber lodges to make for twelve hunnert warriors!”
But for that deserted encampment of conical brush, branch, and log shelters, there wasn’t another sign of the Blackfoot. Six days after the enemy had abandoned the country, Bridger’s brigade crossed the Yellowstone at the mouth of Clark’s Fork and started east. Bass marched with them those first few days until they reached Pryor Creek where he hailed his farewells. The sixty-one would push east for the Bighorn with plans to hunt buffalo while Scratch turned Samantha downstream to look for the Crow camp, anxious to rejoin his family.
That spring, after caching their winter goods, Scratch took Waits-by-the-Water, Magpie, and the infant boy north for the Musselshell country where the beaver grew sleek, their pelts much darker than anywhere to the south. At the site where he had been mauled by a sow grizzly seven years before, Bass sat beside the river with his family and the old dog, burned some sage and sweetgrass in a small fire at their feet, then smoked his pipe while the boy nursed in his mother’s arms. Here in this place, with the sleepy child’s tummy filled, Titus decided the time had come for him to name his son.
“For a long, long time,” he told Magpie, who sat in his lap, “I thought I should name your little brother isappe.”
“Woodtick?” his wife asked, looking up as she removed her glistening nipple from the sleeping child’s mouth.
Bass grinned as he looked up at his wife, nodding. “Isn’t he always sucking at you? Just the way a fat little tick sucks blood till he’s so full he falls right off to wait for another deer to walk past.”
Magpie looked closely at her baby brother as he slept, then watched as Waits slipped her breast back inside her dress. With a giggle she looked back at her sleeping brother. “Woodtick. That is a good name, popo.”
“But I will not give him that name,” Scratch corrected, resetting her on one of his knees as Zeke laid his chin on Bass’s other leg. “Next, I thought he should be named for a bird—just like his sister.”
“Yes!” Magpie cried exuberantly. “What bird?”
“Ischi’kiia,” he replied. “Snowbird.”
Waits smiled. “You thought of this because he is our winter baby?”
“Yes,” Scratch declared. “For a long time I thought it would be good to name our children for birds—because they are about as free as any animal I know.”
But Waits asked, “You don’t want to call him Snowbird?”
“No.” Titus wagged his head. “Later I finally figured out our son should have a name that wouldn’t cause other children to make fun of him when he grows a little bigger and starts to play with other youngsters in the Crow village. For a boy, better that it be a strong name.”
“What did you decide for him?” his wife asked.
“Bish’kish’pee,” he replied.
Waits gazed down at their son. “Little Flea?”
“Look at him,” he explained. “See how he clings to you, just like a flea clings to a dog.”
“That is what every child does to its mother,” Waits explained.
Then Scratch continued. “When Flea gets old enough to understand, I want to give him a white name.”
Magpie looked up into her father’s face and asked, “Why do that?”
“I want to give my children the sort of name a white child would have.”
The girl scrambled to her feet there before him, taking some of his beard in each of her tiny hands and holding her face close to his. “Are you going to give me a white name too?”
“I thought I would, one day when you grow bigger, Magpie,” he confirmed. “But I won’t if you are still happy with your Crow name.”
She thought about that for a while, then said, “No. I like Magpie. It feels like it should be my name. Maybe when I am older, you can give me a white name. But while I am a little girl, I am Magpie.”
He grinned. “That’s just how I feel about it too.” And gave her a squeeze. “Go sit with your mother.”
When he took the boy in his arms and Magpie settled in her mother’s lap, Titus said a prayer for them all, asking for a special blessing on the child he was giving the name Flea. When he was done with that simple ceremony, Bass was content to hold the sleeping child across his arms as the air warmed that late afternoon, birds chirping in the budding branches overhead.
After sitting in the exquisite silence for a long time, her daughter dozing in her lap, Waits asked, “Do you think Magpie will marry a white man?”
“In many ways, I hope she doesn’t,” he eventually admitted.
“But my life with you has been very good,” Waits declared. “If I had married a Crow man, I would not travel as far as I have, nor would I see anywhere near as much as I do with you.”
“Doesn’t it make your life harder to stay on the move with your white husband?”
She grinned and shook her head. “No—life would be much, much harder with a Crow husband. A white man takes care of his wife much better, and he treats his woman much better too.”
“Then you hope Magpie finds a white man to marry?”
Nodding, Waits said, “Not just any white man. If she can find a man as good as her father, then I want her to marry him.”
Aroused from her brief nap, the little girl stretched, then toddled over to her
father and clasped her arms around one of his. “Maybe you marry me when I grow up, popo?”
He laughed a little and hugged her close. “I can’t marry you because I am your father. But I can make sure that the man who does marry you will treat you just as good as I treat your mother.”
“Then I won’t marry anyone. I will always live with you and my mother,” Magpie vowed.
Bass grinned at Waits. “Maybe you should tell our daughter that there will come a day when she will be very anxious to leave us so she can go live with a young man.”
“There is no sense in explaining that to her anytime soon, bu’a,” she replied with a grin. “Soon enough your daughter will find out about men all on her own.”
Marching south from the Musselshell after a successful spring hunt, they recrossed the Yellowstone early that summer, hurrying through the lengthening days, putting every mile they could behind them, riding from dawn’s first light until dusk forced them to stop for the night. Striking the Bighorn, they continued on down the Wind River to swing around the far end of the mountains where they crossed the Southern Pass. On its western slope they struck New Fork, following it to its mouth, then turned north on the Green to reach Horse Creek, site of that summer’s rendezvous.
From the high benchland he could see that the Nez Perce were already there, their village raised in a horseshoe bend of the twisting creek beyond the scattered camps of company and free men.
“Where are the many?” Waits asked.
“Didn’t figger us for coming in early,” he told her in English, his eyes narrowing with concern. “Trader ain’t come in yet neither.”
“I am tired of the long journey,” she told him. “We’ll stay awhile. Wait for the trader.”
“Yes,” he said, relieved to know she wasn’t impatient after the long journey. “I promised you a new copper kettle. We’ll wait for the trade goods.”
Beyond the first few camps of free men, he ran across the sprawling settlement of lean-tos and blanket bowers where the company men sat out these midsummer days, watching the east for signs of the caravan. Just beyond Bridger’s brigade Bass found a small copse of trees that would do while they joined the wait. After a day occupied with setting up their shelters and dragging in some wood from down the valley, he spent a morning untying the rawhide whangs from his packs of fur, dusting and combing each pelt for vermin, then carefully repacking them until it came time for the St. Louis men to attach a value to his year’s labor.
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