Ride the Moon Down

23

Those ghastly, unspeakable images Levi had burned into his mind continued to haunt Bass, day and night.

Scratch even believed he could somehow smell the stench of those dying people, wriggling maggots starting to nibble away at their decaying bodies even before they had taken their last breath.

Once those who had been inoculated with Jacob Halsey’s illness began to sicken with the maddening fever and die, the fort workers were ordered to remove their families at the first sign of the disease. The half-burned Fort William barely standing a hundred-some yards east of the Fort Union stockade became their sick haven. This post where the Deschamps clan once reigned soon became a den of death.

Most days, Levi had explained, the winds in that country came from the west, occasionally out of the north. But on those rare days when the wind did not blow at all—or worse yet, the upslope breeze drifted out of the east—the stench of putrefying flesh of those too ill to do anything but lie in their own human excrement mingled with the unbearable reek of decaying bodies.

This matter of odor, even stench, was something of such immediate vividness to one who lived among these mountains. Outdoors, here beneath this restless sky, in a land where the air always moved, for a man to describe to another the overwhelming power of that decay made it so vivid that Titus believed he truly could smell death’s most gruesome, repulsive retribution in his own nostrils.

From the ramparts of Fort Union the company employees watched many of their loved ones and friends, watched those friendly Assiniboine stricken with the unbearable fevers, all go stumbling down the barren slope to the boat landing at the Missouri where they plunged themselves into the cold waters, their dulled minds seeking somehow to snuff out the unquenchable fire. Most who plunged into the river simply never returned to the bank. Their constitutions weakened, sapped by the pox’s destructive power, then shocked by the brutal cold of the powerful and capricious spring-fed currents, one after another they vainly flailed at the river as they were swept away to a watery end.

And that moaning Levi described—the uncanny wails drifting night and day from the blackened walls of Fort William, from those hide lodges where death’s angel touched the Assiniboine one after another—and from the dusty banks of the river where the few went to mourn the many who had crawled to the Missouri to die.

Through the hours of that winter blizzard, Gamble described the pitiful whimpering of the dying children, the groans of the women no longer able to care for their little ones. How the horror of it floated on that dry summer wind both day and night without ceasing.

“Like a haunting,” Levi quietly explained.

An undeniable wraith that would not depart, could not be driven away. Unceasing until its ravenous appetite had consumed all and there were none left to cry out for mercy.

“What become of ’em?” Titus had asked as winter’s fury howled outside those log walls of Fort Van Buren. “Y-your family.”

“After more’n a day of quiet—not a sound from anyone or anything—I went to the stockade. Looked in through the window at all that was left of them what went there to die,” Gamble whispered. “There was nothing moving but for the scratch of the mice at the food we’d brung to leave at the walls for the sick’uns.”

“They … your wife and chirrun … was all took?”

“Aye, Titus. Some of us, we soaked our kerchiefs in coal oil and tied ’em around our noses, done our best to remember to breathe through our mouths. But still that stink … that stink.”

“You done what you had to do to bury your own family,” Scratch said barely above a whisper.

But Gamble shook his head. “No. Rolled my little’uns onto them poxy blankets. Found ever’ one of ’em being et up with maggots awready. Their skin oozy and bleeding from the sores, the maggots swarming and wriggling in every hole on their flesh. Nothing else to do but drag ’em all out to the prairie where the village stood, and we built us a big fire. Throwed downed trees and logs, lodgepoles and hides too on that fire till the flames climbed clear to the sky and the smoke reached even higher.”

Then for a long moment it seemed the very breath had gone out of Levi’s body, and he could not speak as he was reliving the ghastly horror of it.

Titus swallowed. “A fire?”

Staring at a spot between his moccasins on the earthen floor, the aging frontiersman explained, “We throwed the dead on the fire. Prayed we’d burn the pox till there was nothing for the pox to live on no more.” Levi shuddered. “The way it ate on humankind—just the way we humans eat the flesh of the poor dumb creatures we kill.”

Scratch found himself unable to escape Gamble’s gruesome, heartfelt descriptions, haunted every mile he took his family west from the mouth of the Tongue. Those grisly images continued to prey upon his mind like frightening specters from that world beyond his own. Terrifying images all too real: the stench of filth and rotting corpses, the horror of those hideous and oozing pustules writhing with maggots, and finally the purifying heat of that raging bonfire as the sanctifying flames consumed loved ones.

Each day Titus found he repeatedly turned in the saddle to assure himself Waits-by-the-Water was still behind him, to confirm that she held little Flea in her arms or that his cradleboard swung from the tall pommel of her prairie-chicken saddle. Every night when they made camp and Waits busied herself at the fire, Titus clutched those children more firmly against him; later he wrapped himself more securely around his wife as they slept in their robes.

To lose them the way Levi lost his woman, their children … was a prospect far more terrifying than the possibility of losing his own life. Better was it that he die himself than to face a future lonely, stark, and bleak without the three of them.

It was to be a winter when the way of the mountains was turned on its head.

Fort Van Buren had been no more than a day behind them when Scratch hustled their ponies into a copse of cottonwood and brush on the south bank of the Yellowstone. No more than a quarter mile ahead he spotted some horsemen picking their way along the bottom ground at the foot of the rimrocks along the north side of the river. After leaving the others in hiding, Bass ventured out on foot to have himself a look before he made himself known. If the bunch was Crow, he could ask them where he would find Yellow Belly’s village.

But turned out they were Blackfoot.

Studying them closely with his small, leather-covered brass looking glass, Titus noted those greased forelocks standing stiffly, provocatively erect as a challenge to any would-be enemy, daring an opponent to attempt removing the scalp. Behind more than two dozen riders came at least that many riderless horses, the whole cavvyyard moving east at an easy pace. Close as he could tell, none of them were wearing paint. Moseying the way they were, nary a one of them displaying his special medicine, Scratch doubted they could be a war party. A bunch of bucks out for scalps and plunder didn’t drag along some pack animals. He figured that after they had wrapped up their raiding and were hightailing it on out of Crow country, then they planned to pack their stolen goods atop those extra horses.

But this bunch was loping east—toward the farthest reaches of Absaroka. If he didn’t know better, he might figure they were riding for the Tongue.

Letting them pass well out of sight before he emerged from hiding to hurry back for his family, Bass brooded how odd it was if the Blackfoot might actually be making for Tullock’s post. They had their own fort well up on the Missouri. Then again, these might well be some Blackfoot what belonged to a band who hadn’t gone in to trade with Culbertson at Fort McKenzie last summer when the pox’s prairie fire was igniting. This bunch might be from a village that later brushed up against some of those who got themselves infected from Culbertson’s men and the company’s goods.

If these horsemen had witnessed how the white man’s scourge devastated their brothers, it was possible they had sworn off packing their furs to Fort McKenzie some six miles upriver from the mouth of the Marias where old Fort Piegan stood abandoned and decaying, deciding instead to haul their robes and plews south and east to trade for powder and lead, guns and blankets at the Crows’ trading post.

Damn, if the pox hadn’t pulled the pegs right out from under the whole teetering balance of things here in the north country.

Power might well be in the process of shifting already. As the scourge ate its way through the Blackfoot, it would kill off a sizable number of their warrior bands—Blood, Piegan, Gros Ventre. Never again would they be as mighty as they had been from that day Meriwether Lewis’s party of explorers chanced to bump into them on the expedition’s homeward trek to St. Louis. With every year since that unfortunate tragedy in 1806, the tribe had grown more than intractable.

The Blackfoot had gone after Americans with a vengeance.

With fewer and fewer warriors, as well as fewer women to seed future generations of fighting men, this once-most-powerful confederation in the Northern Rockies could do nothing but watch their mighty strength slip through their fingers like overdry river-bottom sand. Without their overwhelming numbers, the Blackfoot would be hard-pressed to maintain the pressure on those American brigades daring to nibble hungrily around the edges of that once-forbidden beaver country where a man most certainly was gambling with his life.

All the more white men would come to shove back the Blackfoot frontier, season after season, assault after assault.

Those superstitious Blackfoot still alive after the pox had run its course would naturally believe that Fort McKenzie was the seat of the disease and their devastation. So they would seek out other traders, to the north among the English, and to the south among the hated Americans. Especially if that post lay in a region abandoned by the Crow who had been terrified enough to stay as far away as possible from Fort Van Buren.

If the Crow had heard of the disease and were avoiding Tullock at all costs, then they wouldn’t be trading to the benefit of the greedy company, nor trading for the powder and ball they themselves needed to hold back any Blackfoot encroachment upon Absaroka. Their superstition or their ignorance would keep them away from the mouth of the Tongue.

Could he blame the Crow for their fear? Not with the pox raging upriver and across the prairies as the Blackfoot carried it right into the heart of the Rockies.

Titus didn’t know how the devastation was transmitted. Never had understood such matters. Did the Blackfoot have to touch the Crow to pass along the infection? Or … could it be something as simple as the wind? Was this terror no more than a matter of the air in the Blackfoot country drifting over the hills and down the river valleys to reach Absaroka? Like a windwhipped grassfire, this scourge might well race from village to village on the air they would breathe, seeping stealthily from lodge to lodge. The infected would believe if they ran fast enough, if they fled far enough, they would stay ahead of what death loomed on the backtrail.

Then one night as Scratch banked their fire and slipped beneath the robes beside Waits, the cold of it suddenly struck him: if the Crow were as afraid of Tullock as they were of the company traders at Fort Union, how in heaven were the Crow going to react to him … one of the race who had brought this terrible epidemic to the mountains?

How could they believe that he wasn’t carrying the disease? Would they even trust in Waits-by-the-Water?

Or because they so desperately feared the pox brought by the Americans, would the Crow warriors do everything in their power to prevent him from reaching their village?

Instead of risking that gamble, would the Crow decide they must kill him?

Scratch had begun to wonder if they ever would find Yellow Belly’s people.

For the better part of a month they had been scouring the river valley, west all the way to the Big Bend of the Yellowstone then back to Clark’s Fork, with no sign of either village. Not a clue on the River Crow; no Mountain band either. For the past two weeks he had begun to despair of finding them at all, much less finding the village in time to warn them of the danger from the north.

But Bass swallowed it all down, refusing to let her know of his doubts. On and on they plodded from first light to last, halting only when it grew so dark he dared not stumble on through the broken, icy country. At the mouth of every tiny creek they passed, he brooded on what he should be doing instead of this fool’s errand Tullock and Gamble had talked him into accepting.

This was clearly a time when a man should be stalking the flat-tails. Plain enough the animals would have grown a thick coat, as brutal as this winter had become. Why didn’t he just admit he had failed and go off to do what he had done for the last few winters—spend a handful of days away from the lodge to trap on his lonesome, then return with the pelts for her to scrape and stretch, play with the youngsters, couple with her each night until he felt that itch to leave again?

But every time he tried talking logically, rationally, to himself about it, reciting the litany of reasons why he should put this futile search aside and get on with the white man’s business of trapping beaver … Titus felt that sharp pang of remorse in his belly—the way something distasteful soured his meat bag. He knew he would never be able to look his wife in the eye if he gave up.

Should they not find the village until spring, so be it. More important than his beaver was this matter of his duty to Waits-by-the-Water’s people.

For three more days they moved up Clark’s Fork, traveling some seventy miles south of the Yellowstone. Odd that they hadn’t run across any sign of hunters, much less sign of the village itself. That many people camped for the winter somewhere near the valley of the Yellowstone had to leave some evidence of their passing. So many hundreds upon hundreds of bellies to feed, thousands upon thousands of ponies needing pasture. So far, not a sign along the Yellowstone, nothing from the Tongue to the Great Bend and back again to Clark’s Fork.

They had come to the very foot of the mountains. Instead of pushing on to the south into the narrowing valley, Scratch turned east. Climbing with the rising ground on the sunrise side of the fork, they dropped into a high rolling country. To the west lay the Stinking Water and what the trappers called Colter’s Hell, a route that would lead a man into the region the Crow revered as the Land of Spirit Smokes. To the east lay the valley of the Bighorn. Ahead to the south lay the Greybull basin.

“Have your people ever come this far south to winter?” he asked her that night after they had camped among some hot pools of sulfurous water.

“Twice, when I was much younger,” Waits said as she stood from pulling off the last moccasin.

She grabbed the bottom of her hide dress and raised it over her head. When she had shimmied out of her blanket leggings, Waits tested the water’s temperature, sticking her toe into the pool where he sat submerged to his armpits. Around them a gauzy steam wisped into cold midwinter air.

He glanced at their children sleeping a few yards back from the edge of the pool. “Come here.”

As she glided through the smoky water, he reached out and pulled her to him. “Why would your village ever come so far south?”

“If the winter was terribly cold,” she explained as she settled across the tops of his thighs. “They will always go where there is meat, where the winds won’t blow so long and hard. Where spring might return a little sooner.”

He bent, kissed the tops of her breasts as they shimmered at the surface of the water. His flesh stirred.

“How far south would they go?”

“I can remember wintering one time in the shadow of the mountains.”

He pointed off to the south. “Those mountains still far away?”

“Yes,” she answered, but her voice had lowered an octave with that huskiness born of hunger as she took his hardening flesh into her hand, kneading it.

“Then we should go until the River of the Winds turns west at the foot of the mountains?”

“At least that far.”

He sighed with the delicious pleasure she was bringing him as she rubbed his flesh against herself, as she began to squirm a little in anticipation of him. “I am sure this is the season we spent together in Taos, the happy celebration before I left.”

“Ta-house,” Waits repeated the word in English. Then in Crow she said, “I remember the sweet foods Rosa made for us, the smells from her warm cooking, the flavors she put in her coffee so strong, sweet, and milky.”

“You are milky too,” he said as he gently raised one of her breasts, then sucked at the nipple while she groaned, suckled gently until he tasted the warm, sweet, sticky milk.

She reminded him, “Th-that is your son’s milk.”

“But this is his father’s breast.”

“So whose is this?” she asked, squeezing his manhood firmly as she rose a little, positioned his hardened flesh, then settled down on him with an agonizingly delicious slowness.

He rocked his hips upward, squirming to seat himself within her. “I think it is yours now.”

“Then we agree,” she said devilishly as she began to rock more insistently upon him. “It does belong to me.”

The following morning they pushed on south, marching upriver for the mountains that loomed ever larger to the southeast, a chain stretching across the entire horizon, their pinnacles and slopes blotted by an unbroken mantle of snow extending from hoary crests all the way down to the valley floor. At the mouth of the Popo Agie they turned north by northwest, following the Wind River along its foothills. After a snowfall two days later they crossed a large trail. Hunters. If it wasn’t the Crow, he figured it might well be the Snake.

They followed the tracks north for another day, then made camp after sundown, once it had grown too dark to follow those tracks left by more than a dozen horses. That night when he stepped away from the fire to look after the animals, Scratch stood among the ponies, rubbing Samantha’s withers. After a few minutes he became aware of the faint fragrance of wood smoke drifting in on the wind.

Turning this way, then that, Titus realized he wasn’t smelling his own fire. Instead, it had to be smoke wafting over the hilltop just beyond their campsite. His heart leaped.

Crunching across the surface of the frozen ground, he loped through the trees toward the crest where the black of the night sky collided with the pale blue of the icy, moonlit snow. By the time he reached the top, Scratch was out of breath, huffing as much from sheer anticipation as he was with the exertion. At first it did not strike him what he was seeing, those tiny specks of light appearing as so many points of starshine reflected off the endless smear of snow in the far valley.

Slowly he realized they had to be campfires. More than a hundred of them. A few glittered brightly, but most had a translucent, opaque quality to them.

“Lodges,” he whispered as excitement gushed up within him.

Then turned on his heel and hurried downhill through the animals for their campfire.

“Woman!” Scratch cried lustily as he came bounding up. “Woman—I see a village below!”

“Ssshhh,” she warned, pointing to where the children lay sleeping, then asked, “Are there many lodges?”

He gulped for air, swallowed, and said, “It must be Yellow Belly’s camp. There are hundreds of lights—many, many fires and lodges.”

“I think I will have trouble sleeping tonight,” she said, leaping to her feet and throwing her arms around him.

“It makes my heart glad to see how happy this makes you,” he declared, squeezing her tightly. “Tomorrow you will see your mother, you will see Strikes-in-Camp and his family too.”

Burying her face against the crook of his neck, Waits-by-the-Water confided softly, “I have been so afraid that they were no more, husband. I feared they had been swept away like the others who have been touched by the white man’s death.”

“But they haven’t disappeared,” he consoled her.

“Until now, a big hole in my heart feared that very thing,” she admitted. “I did not want to trust we could find them. As the days became many, I grew more afraid we would find empty lodges, skeletons of bone wrapped in tattered clothing, every one of my people eaten by this terrible sickness.”

“We found them alive. They are safe,” he reassured her, his own tangible relief lifting a great weight from his shoulders. “Tomorrow we will rejoin your mother, your brother, and his family. And tomorrow night we can laugh at your fears as we gather around their fire, all of us, and throw these fears of yours into the flames.”

“Tomorrow,” she echoed the word in a whisper. “I was so afraid tomorrow would never come.”

That dawn came cold and gray, a hulking bank of clouds the color of a ripe bruise hovering halfway down the mountain slopes. By the time Flea had nursed and Magpie finished chewing some cold meat from last night’s supper with her father, Bass had the animals packed for what should be a short ride.

He had been anticipating this morning ever since the day they put Fort Van Buren behind them. Afraid he would only deepen what he could see was his wife’s own growing anxiety, Scratch kept his fears to himself. Day by day he had become a bit more morose—swallowing deep the slightest image his mind conjured of their searching endlessly, eventually to stumble across a camp of Crow lodges, entering the circle to discover that it was now home only to magpies and robber jays, coyotes and wolves, as the flocks and packs of predators worked over the bodies of three thousand dead.

In his own way Scratch had been praying every day that when they finally found Yellow Belly’s camp, they would not find a village of ghosts. Afraid that after saving them from the blizzard, God would not now succor his newest prayer.

With the way the wind was quickly quartering around to blow out of the northwest, the smell of wood smoke grew strong once again. Far behind them now stood that ridge crest where he had peered into this valley as the unnumbered fires twinkled in the clear, subfreezing night air. Ahead, in that bottom ground where a creek flowed out of the tall, cloud-covered mountains to pour itself into Wind River, stood the camp. Hundreds upon hundreds of smoky spires rose from the lodges, each column quickly absorbed by the belly of those low-hanging clouds momentarily hued with a reddish-orange tint as the sun foretold its emergence from the east.

“Camp guards,” she announced, pointing to their right.

He turned in the saddle, finding the eight horsemen bursting from the timber, loping their way.

More hooves clattered to their left as another half dozen broke into the open. These, like the first, carried shields at their left elbows, war clubs or bows in their right hands, while a few held aloft long lances festooned with scalps and brightly colored cloth streamers made all the more brilliant in these moments of the sun’s brief journey between earth and cloud bank.

At first he did not recognize any of the young men coming their way, afraid this was not a Crow village. But as the riders approached, he recognized the hairstyles, the special markings on a shield here or there. And then he heard a camp guard yelling at them in his wife’s tongue.

These were Crow!

But instead of welcoming, the voices shouted in warning, two of them now—both voices strident and … afraid.

“What are they telling us?” he asked of her, beginning to pull back on the pony’s reins uneasily.

“We must stop,” she said in dismay, her eyes as wide as Mexican conchos when she looked to him for explanation.

Of a sudden Titus was afraid he knew the answer. Fourteen warriors fanned out in a broad front as they came to a halt fifty yards from them.

“Popo?”

“Ssshhh,” he rasped at Magpie.

He felt the girl pull herself against his back more tightly as she tilted her face up so she could whisper to him.

“Why is my mother so afraid?”

Scratch looked at Waits-by-the-Water and had to admit she did look frightened.

“I think she is excited about—”

“Do not come any closer!” interrupted the warrior beneath the swelling wreath of frosty breath that encircled his head.

“But we are friends,” Bass hollered in reply, watching one of the guards rein about and kick his pony into a lope, heading back to the village.

“I know you, Waits-by-the-Water,” the first warrior admitted. “When my younger sister was a little girl, you and she played together with your tiny lodges and horses and dolls. But you cannot—”

“Three Iron?” she suddenly asked. “Is that you?”

“Yes—”

“Then you know us!” Waits interrupted. “Why don’t you invite us into the camp? I have waited a long time to see my mother again, to show her how much her grandson has grown.”

“I can’t invite you into the village,” he shouted.

“But—you are my people!” she cried.

“Your husband is not,” Three Iron explained.

Far behind the camp guards Bass saw two riders emerge from the village, coming their way at a gallop. He turned to look quickly at the dismay on her face, realizing he must try to talk some sense into these warriors.

“You say you know me,” Titus began, hearing Magpie start to whimper quietly against his back. “Your people have always welcomed me—even when I came on foot chasing horse thieves.”

“I am Red Leggings,” shouted one of the guards near the end of the crescent. “I was with Pretty On Top the day we rode off with your animals many winters ago.”

“Then you must explain why you will not allow me to bring my wife and children into your camp to see their relations.”

Halting, one of the arriving horsemen announced, “It would be dangerous.”

“Strikes-in-Camp?” she wailed. “Is that you, my brother?”

“Yes, sister. I am here.”

She nudged her pony forward, saying, “How I longed to see you and my mother—”

At that instant Scratch lunged over and grabbed the pony’s halter, pulling to a stop.

“Stay there, sister!” Strikes-in-Camp demanded. “You can come no closer.”

“Brother!” she shrieked, covering her face with a hand.

Magpie began to wail behind him.

“Why won’t you accept your sister into the camp of her people?” Titus asked in a strong voice, words hanging brittle as ice while the clouds lowered over them. The sun was disappearing, rising into the blue-black, as if all the warmth of that crimson light was being snuffed out. Tiny lances of ice darted about their faces, stinging the cold flesh.

Strikes-in-Camp explained. “She might be sick.”

“S-sick?” Waits sobbed. “Only my heart is sick to be treated so badly by my people—”

Afraid he already knew, the trapper asked, “How do you think your sister is sick?”

“She is with a white man,” yelled another man.

“How will that make her sick, Strikes-in-Camp?”

“In that hottest part of the summer, we heard the stories of the white man sickness killing other tribes,” his brother-in-law explained, his pony pawing a hoof at the frozen, snowy ground.

Pausing as he thought, Bass suddenly said, “But you can see I am not sick—”

“We have heard the white man does not grow sick and die with this terrible affliction,” another warrior interrupted. “Only the Indians. Mandans, Arikara, Assiniboine, even Blackfoot too. Now that you have come, white man—this evil has followed us here.”

“You ran away from your fear of it, didn’t you?” Titus asked.

“The old men believed it the wisest,” the young warrior declared. “The oldest among them remembered the tribal stories of another time long, long ago when our people lived close to the great muddy river—a time when this same evil sickness of the seeping wounds and fever swept through the villages along the river.”

“The Crow have known about this sickness before?”

“Yes,” the young warrior said. “Our old men say only a few died because our people quickly scattered onto the prairie, running faster than the invisible terror that had come to kill us all.”

Bass nodded. “So your chiefs decided you should run again.”

“And stay as far away as we can from the white man who once more brings this evil to kill Indians who are his enemies,” Strikes-in-Camp said. “Even Indians who are his friends.”

“Look at me. I am not sick.”

“You are a white man. You carry the sickness in you,” he said, waving his arm in frustration. “While it doesn’t consume you, it will kill us.”

Stretching out his arm to indicate his wife, Bass said, “Look at your sister! She is alive! We have been to Tullock’s post and she did not die. Our children are still alive. There is no disease in them!”

Clearly frustrated now, Strikes-in-Camp roared, “You must stay away!”

“B-brother!” she keened, her voice rising even as the black belly of the clouds tore open with the first falling of an icy snow.

“If I take my wife into your camp to see her mother, what will happen to me?”

The warrior said, “I will have to kill you.”

Bass swallowed hard. “And if my wife comes to see her mother without me?”

Drawing himself up, Strikes-in-Camp said, “I will have to kill her.”

“We are not your enemies,” Bass snarled, feeling angry at his helplessness.

“The white man brought this sickness to the mountains. You must stay away from us.”

Scratch reached over and took his wife’s forearm in his mitten, gripping it reassuringly. “Tell your mother … say we send her our love and want to see her face one day soon.”

“Perhaps one day,” Strikes-in-Camp said sadly.

Waits began to cry, covering her face with a blanket mitten as she wheeled her pony around and started on their backtrail.

“Strikes-in-Camp,” Titus called. “You must be careful.”

“Of other white men like you?”

“No,” he replied. “I bring a warning that the Crow must be careful of the Blackfoot.”

“Not the white man?”

“No,” Bass said. “The Blackfoot carry this terrible sickness now.”