At times the two of them gathered a small crowd of curious Indians and trappers who collected on the shady banks to watch their amusing efforts. More often than not the small native trout and grayling weren’t shy about taking the wriggling bait that floated on the surface of the water. It never failed to surprise Titus when a sharp tug pulled on that twine he had knotted at the end of a peeled willow branch.
Eating the tiny fish was a different matter altogether. What with all the little bones, he soon decided it was far more work than was worth the effort. Antelope or elk or buffalo it would be from here on out. Just as long as the fish didn’t ever get greedy and start eating beaver, Scratch figured he would leave those fish in peace.
By late fall, after trapping his way through the Wind River Mountains and up the Bighorn, he had his family back on the Yellowstone and in the heart of Crow country. The weather had grown cold early that autumn, then moderated as the days sailed past. Instead of turning west, where he believed he might run onto Yellow Belly’s village, he started east for the Rosebud and the Tongue. Since winter appeared slow in arriving, Titus decided he could steal a final few weeks of trapping out of the season, working their way toward Fort Van Buren before they had to turn west, searching for the Crow in their winter camp.
Even though the water in the kettles lay covered by a thin ice slick every morning, the sun always rose, warming the earth blanketed by autumn-dried grasses, lacy collars of old, dirty snow strangling every bush or tree trunk. Along the Tongue the beaver were starting to put on a heavier coat, that protective felt nestled below the long guard hairs growing all the thicker. As the days passed, Scratch read the sign plain for any man who took a notion to pay heed.
A hard winter was due.
So when the faraway horizon threatened many days later, Scratch quickly hurried back to camp where he loaded their plews and possessions on Samantha and their horses, then lit out for Tullock’s post. They might well have as much as a day. From the looks of that gray-blue skyline rearing its ugly head out of the north, they should have enough time for the journey before the storm clobbered them. Down, down the Tongue they hurried, their noses pointed for the Yellowstone, riding straight into the teeth of the coming fury as the wind began to quarter around, carrying with it that distinct metallic tang of a high plains blizzard.
Reluctantly he agreed to stop that night short of their goal. Lighting a fire, Bass figured to give his family and the animals a few hours’ rest before sunup. But Scratch had them moving again before night had been completely sucked out of the dawn sky.
By the middle of that second morning the storm’s first sullen tantrum was taunting them. Snowflakes sharp as iron arrowheads slashed this way and that at their bare cheeks as they rode hunched over, head-tucked into the softly keening wind.
“How far, popo?” Magpie asked, her tiny voice muffled against his chest where he had the girl wrapped beneath the buffalo robe covering them both as the horses plodded forward one slow step at a time, icy heads bent against the mighty gale.
Each time he blinked, his eyes cried out in pain—the wind-driven shards slashing across them. By now his eyelashes were little more than heavy crusts of ice he struggled to keep open. Scratch figured there was no sense in telling Magpie the truth. Better to tell his daughter what she needed to hear then and there.
“I think I see some familiar hills ahead,” he lied in Crow. Truth was, he couldn’t see much past the end of his pony’s nose.
Worried suddenly about Waits-by-the-Water, Bass twisted in the saddle. The gusty wind almost tore the coyote-hide cap from his head.
Back there a matter of yards from his pony’s tail root, Titus thought he saw the movement of her shadow, barely making out Samantha’s dark outline plodding flank to flank beside his wife’s pony. The moment the wind had first come up that morning, he had knotted a rope to both of those saddles, looping the other ends beneath his left leg before he knotted them around the large pommel the size and shape of a Spanish orange at the front of his Santa Fe saddle. He had strung the rest of the pack animals out behind the mule, connecting each one to another animal in front and another in back with more rope. Since starting in that frozen predawn darkness, Bass had brooded that the storm might well cut the strong animals from the weak.
Because one or more of the ponies might break free and turn about with the force of the wind, he had packed what they needed to survive on Samantha. The rest he could go in search of after the storm’s fury had played itself out. But the mule carried what might well save their lives even if all else were taken from them.
“My mother, she is near?” Magpie asked.
He figured she became frightened when he turned to look behind him.
“She’s with us, daughter,” he reassured her, his teeth chattering like bone dominoes in that horn cup Hames Kingsbury loved to rattle while floating down the river.
He wondered if Kingsbury was an old man now. If not—where he was buried. Perhaps even put to rest in the Mississippi the way they had consigned Ebenezer Zane’s body to the river back in 1810. Or maybe on that thieves’ road known as the Natchez Trace. Would any of the others still be alive …
Dragging the ice-crusted wool blanket mitten across his eyes, then under his red, swollen nose, his raw, chapped, ice-battered skin shrieked in torment. Suddenly Titus held his breath, put his nose back into the wind, and breathed deep.
Wood smoke.
By damn, it was wood smoke.
That meant a fire. And where he would find a fire, there must be humankind. Somewhere he could get out of the storm and warm up his nearly frozen wife and children. A lodge, even a windbreak …
“You smell that?”
After a moment his daughter asked, “Smell only you in here against your heart.”
“Magpie,” his voice cracked, “I smell wood smoke.”
“A f-fire, popo?”
“Yes—a fire.” He spoke it like a promise. “You’ll be warm soon.”
His mind racing, Scratch sorted through the possibilities the way he would sort through his pelts: thinking of the worst that could happen, pushing that aside to cling to the best. At the very least he knew that with this wind blowing into his face, that fire had to be due north of them. A blind man could stumble across it now. Even if it were nothing but some hunter who found himself caught out in the storm and quickly erected a crude windbreak, such a shelter would be more than the four of them had right then anyway.
Too—he considered—a praying man might beg God that they would find a fire glowing inside a Crow lodge where they could huddle out of the wind while the storm exhausted itself just beyond their sanctuary of poles and buffalo hides. But then he admitted that Titus Bass never had been the sort to get down on his prayer bones and taffy up to the Lord the way his mam had tried to teach her young’uns to do.
But at times like these when a man simply could do no more on his own to protect those he loved, when it was simply beyond his own power … then he supposed it wouldn’t hurt to see if the All-Maker was listening. Just as long as the four of them made it to shelter and lived out the storm, as long as this storm didn’t take his wife, or his daughter, or that little baby boy, Bass promised he would do anything in return. All God had to do was show him what was expected.
A man what didn’t spend much of his time listening to anything the Almighty had to say wasn’t the sort of man who could easily read the All-Maker’s sign. Not like Asa McAfferty—now, that was a fella who could cipher the Lord’s word plain as sun. But someone like Titus Bass might well be hard-pressed to figure out when God was talking to him, or even what tongue the Everywhere Spirit chose to speak in.
Nonetheless, if God saw his family through, Bass vowed he would do his best to be attentive to what God might ask in return, where- or whenever.
As strong as the fragrant tang of wood smoke grew in his sore, drippy nostrils, Scratch believed they had to be getting close. Step by step, stronger and stronger.
At ti
mes it became difficult to keep the bank of the Tongue close by on their right, what with the way the trees and willow forced them to ride several yards from the riverbank, sweeping slowly this way and that as they needled their way through the underbrush. The pack ponies began to protest now, pulling back on Samantha—making her bray in distress or anger at the way they were attempting to turn about and flee in the face of the brutal wind. For a moment he stopped, just long enough to loop the mule’s rope twice around his left wrist, clutching Magpie against him with his right arm, the pony’s reins held short and tight in that right hand as he struggled to get the horse started again into the teeth of the storm.
Out of the swirling gray gloom leaped the flickering glow of the fire, a corona of yellow glittering in the midst of the wavering, white-diamond air as snowflakes darted about in wispy, wind-driven trails. As they approached, Titus could tell that the fire had been huge not so long ago, nearly a bonfire fed by huge trunks and limbs of downfall someone had dragged to this small riverbank clearing. But now the man-high inferno had whipped itself so furiously that the firewood was nearly exhausted and on the verge of dying.
No one here to attend it. Like a beacon lit, then abandoned.
For barely a moment as he halted the exhausted pony again, Titus spotted two meat-drying racks erected back against the cottonwoods … then the blackened crowns of those small rocks arranged in a crude fire-ring where a lodge might once have stood. Injuns.
Should he stop here—get the three of them down by that fire—then push on by himself into the teeth of the storm?
There on the far side of the fire, that wall of ten-foot willow offered the only windbreak he could see in the fury of wind and snow. Right where those who had abandoned this place had raised their lodge. Perhaps Waits could huddle with the children beneath the three robes he could drape over them, waiting there for his return as the snow continued to build.
When he kicked the pony in the flanks, the animal failed to move. It shuddered the next time he kicked it with the heels of his ice-crusted buffalo-fur moccasins. A third hammer to its ribs finally got the animal lunging away a hoof at a time, slowly stepping around the perimeter of that dying fire, flames wildly licking up the huge logs, sparks spewing from the rotted wood like muzzle blasts, quickly swallowed by the wind, extinguished by the cold like galaxies of dying fireflies—given life in one breath, gone with the next.
On the far side of the fire, upwind, he tugged back on the reins and twisted stiffly in the saddle, his left arm wooden as he raised Samantha’s rope, clumsily trying to find the pony’s lead rope he had looped beneath his belt.
As the wind battered the side of his face, Scratch searched and dug at the side of his elk-hide coat. His cold mind slowly grasped the horror: the pony’s rope was gone! It had somehow disappeared, dragged from his belt without his realizing it—
“W-waits!” he cried hoarsely in English. Even as the word escaped his lips, it was swept away by the gale, swallowed by the keening wind.
“Popo?”
Swallowing hard, he whispered to his daughter, “I’m calling your mother.”
“Is mother there?”
“Y-yes,” he lied again, feeling his eyes pool.
“And little brother?”
“Yes, Magpie.”
God, I told you I would do anything you asked. Spare them. And if you must take any of us, then see they live and you can take me.
Her voice drenched in anguish, the girl whimpered, “I want my mother.”
“Hush, now, Magpie,” he scolded her sharply, angry and bitter at himself as much as he was angry and bitter with the All-Maker. “There’s a fire here where I can get you warm.”
“And my mother too.”
“Yes, daughter—”
“Ti-tuzz!”
Her raspy voice slipped through a lull in the wind a frozen heartbeat before her shadowy, ghostly form loomed out of the blizzard.
“Woman!”
“Ti-tuzz!”
Bending his head down, Bass reassured his daughter, “Your m-mother is here.”
She was sobbing against his breast. “Now you can get all of us warm.”
“Yes,” he gasped as he turned the pony around, watching the black form inch closer. “Now I promise to warm all of you.”
He dropped the mule’s lead rope and held out his left arm, so crusted it felt as if he had been lifting a thick stump of cottonwood. She brought her pony to a halt at his left side, leaning against him beneath that arm, sobbing.
“I thought I’d lost you in the storm,” he said, rubbing that flap of the buffalo robe where her head was buried in the crusted fur. Then he heard the faint whimper of the baby.
“The boy, he is cold. I know he is scared too,” she pleaded as she drew back the fur and tried to gaze up at his face in the storm.
“There is a fire where you and the children can stay while I go in search of shelter. You will be safe here till I can come back for—”
“We will be safe with you.”
“The animals are tired,” he begged her. “Better that I go on alone. I don’t want to lose any of you to the cold and wind.”
She interrupted, “Bu’a, out there minutes ago, I knew we would not die. My heart knew to believe in you. We will go with you.”
Instantly his heart rose to his throat. “No. You must do as I say. Trust me and stay here. I will be back—”
That’s when he dimly realized he was still smelling the wood smoke.
Bass immediately twisted in the saddle, away from his wife, turning his face into the wind once more—sniffing the terrible, metallic teeth of the fury heavy with moisture. Water. Nothing but a dry winter storm that had just crossed a wide river on these high, desertlike plains could smell quite like that.
Yet how was it that the beckoning fragrance of that wood smoke remained strong in his nostrils now that he stood upwind of this abandoned fire?
There had to be another fire to the north. Close to the Yellowstone that relinquished its wind-whipped froth to the storm.
“Come!” he cried. “Stay beside me. And talk to Flea! Keep talking to him so I can hear your voice and know your pony is staying near mine.”
Harder than ever now, he struggled to get the animals moving, horses that acted as if they were no longer ready to bolt from the teeth of the storm, but had decided they were giving up the fight and would die there. Yelling, lashing out with his icy moccasin, he goaded Waits’s pony and his own into lunging, uncertain steps as the white veil grew thicker around them, the wind no longer keening like a bitter, disembodied widow.
Now it howled in anger, sang out in a shrill fury.
At times over the next half hour, which seemed to be an eternity, the wood smoke grew stronger for a few moments, then disappeared altogether—only to return on the back of the wind just when Bass became convinced he had wandered off the path, or had passed the fire by. All through those next anxious minutes his mind tugged at it the way the current of the powerful Platte had tugged at his two horses, eventually claiming one—moving blind into the whiteout.
Suddenly he realized they had stepped off the shallow riverbank, their horses lunging into the Yellowstone. Icy water surged against their legs, washing against their bellies and ribs, swirling around his own left leg, spray and drops freezing instantly as the animals snorted in fear, whinnied in fear—plunging headlong for the north bank without a shred of hesitation. Only blind terror.
Waits cried out, a shrill yelp she stifled as her pony sidestepped there in the middle of the river where it found a deep pocket and swam back out, continuing to battle the current from the west and that blizzard born out of the north.
Stronger and stronger still the odor grew, then disappeared as the blizzard twisted this way and that—
Just as his horse’s front legs floundered and he sensed it was going down, Bass heaved back on Magpie with that left arm as she started to slip away from him, onto the animal’s withers. But with the next step th
e horse rocked back and shuddered, its front legs clawing—seizing ground, lunging onto the north bank with the last of its strength!
Out of the ghostly curtain emerged the dark shadow of the low, hulking block of neatly stacked timbers. He was almost upon the wall when it appeared right before them.
A few more steps and he stopped. Reached out and touched the chinked timbers with his crusted mitten.
“Halloo!” he croaked, barely audible as his cracked lips split even more painfully.
There against the wall, for the moment, they were out of the worst of the wind. He cried again, louder now, “Hal-halloo!”
It had to be Tullock’s post.
Bass reached over and tugged on the other pony’s rope now, getting their horses started again there in the lee of the log wall.
Fort Van Buren. Mouth of the Tongue. North bank of the Yellowstone.
“Halloo! Tullock!”
They reached the end of the wall, where the dark shadow of the timbers disappeared in the blizzard as the wind screeched itself around the low log structure.
“Tullock!” and the wind carried his cry away again—
“Who? Who goes there?”
Titus swallowed, ready to cry as he glanced over at his wife, squeezed his daughter tighter.
“B-bass!” he whimpered into the might of the storm. “Titus Bass!”
“Titus Bass?” the disembodied voice came to him around the corner of those timbers.
The ghost figure suddenly took shape. “I ain’t see’d your hide for longer’n I can count!”
“Tullock?”
“No!” and the tall, rail-thin figure stepped right around the corner of the post, stopping at Scratch’s knee to peer up at the frozen man from the hood of his capote. “It’s Levi, Scratch! Levi Gamble!”
The two tiny rooms that made up Fort Van Buren were gloomy with the blizzard’s blotting out the sun. Little light but for the four smoky oil lamps, a pair of flickering candle lanterns, along with that stone fireplace where two Indian women and a half-dozen children sat basking in the warmth.
Gamble shooed them back, clucking in Assiniboine, clearing a path through them as he ushered Waits-by-the-Water from the creaky door and had her settle right in the middle of the hearth where she dragged the crusted buffalo robe from her shoulders as the ice adhering to it began to sweat and dribble to the hardpacked floor. She bent her head, kissing the boy’s face, wiping her tears from his cheeks.
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