Ride the Moon Down

24

A wolf called that gray morning as the icy snow fell softer, then beat no more against the side of the brush-and-canvas shelter where he lay with her and the children.

Winter was old, almost done. Yet it hung on and on, refusing to give itself to spring.

For weeks now Waits-by-the-Water had hardly spoken a word. She still sang to Flea to put him to sleep at night, and she held Magpie in her arms too. She even made love to him with the same ferocity she always had … but she did not talk much at all.

Never, never about Yellow Belly’s camp. Not one word about her people.

Better to let that wound be, he decided, hoping it would heal on its own.

That wolf howled again, perhaps a different one. It was a plaintive call, anguished and lonely.

If it had been raining—instead of snowing—Titus might be more concerned, even afraid. A wolf that came out to howl in the rain was the spirit of a warrior killed before his time. So if it were raining instead of that weepy snow, it might well make him venture from these warm robes and blankets, push into the cold timber in search of that restless, disembodied spirit.

Up there in Blackfoot country was damn well going to be plenty of wolves to howl in the rain come spring. Maybe the cold of winter had killed all the pox. Nothing like that was going to live through the long, deep cold of this northern land. If the Blackfoot weren’t all dead from the disease, then at least the pox was finished now. And what was left of the tribe was nothing more than a pale shadow of what they had been.

Ghosts.

Mandan, Arikara, Assiniboine, and Blackfoot. And now the Crow.

Yellow Belly’s people might as well have been ghosts too. Day after day, week upon week, he and Waits-by-the-Water never could get very close to the village before camp guards rode up shouting, threatening, until she explained that she only wanted one of the warriors to bring her mother to the edge of camp. Just to see Crane’s face in the distance, to know she was still alive. To show her mother they were still alive and well. So Crane could see they were not being eaten by a terrible sickness.

The children waved to Crane across that distance, and their grandmother waved back—then suddenly turned, slump-shouldered, and hurried back into the village with her daughter-in-law’s arm around her shoulder. That retreat always made Waits-by-the-Water even sadder.

Something on the order of a week later Bass had finally convinced her they had no business keeping a vigil around the fringes of that camp of frightened people.

Ghosts, he thought. His wife’s family might as well be ghosts.

That last time Crane brought the rest of them with her, all of Strikes-in-Camp’s family. Bright Wings and the children waved before they turned to go. Then, before she retreated into the village, Crane pointed to an outcropping of rocks several hundred yards from the village. She gestured expansively, struggling to make herself understood.

Then Waits began to cry and held up little Flea to wave to his grandmother. Titus helped Magpie stand tall upon his shoulders as she signaled to that small, distant person. In the end the girl even blew kisses to her grandmother the way Titus taught her to do. Waits turned away with Flea, and they returned to their camp where his wife sobbed until close to sundown.

When they remembered the point of rocks. Hurrying there, Waits discovered a newly smoked antelope skin wrapped inside a piece of oiled rawhide. Within it rested several small gifts Crane had bundled together: a tiny deer-hair-stuffed doll for Magpie and a stuffed horse for Flea, two small whistles carved from cedar, while beneath them all lay a badger-claw necklace.

Her breath caught in her throat when she saw the necklace, pulled it slowly from the antelope skin.

“This belonged to my fa—” But she quickly remembered. “He-Who-Is-No-Longer-With-Us,” Waits explained, holding the claws and beads reverently across the palms of both hands.

“It is a very great thing for your mother to want you to have this,” Bass said. “Did he carve these whistles?”

“I think he must have,” she replied quietly, rubbing their red wood with a fingertip. “That was his name. I remember how our people knew of him because he could blow on a whistle he made with his own hands—blowing a sound just like the bull elk calling from the mountainside in the autumn.”

“Waits-by-the-Water,” he sighed, “your mother wanted you to have something of him to show our children.”

“Yes,” she sobbed, “a totem to show Magpie and Flea when we tell them about their grandfather.”

She put it on, and he realized she meant never to take it off. Right from the moment she dropped the necklace over her head, Scratch knew that somehow it made her feel closer not just to her father who no longer lived, but to her mother. Closer to her people.

But he never uttered a word about his deepest fear, more a regret. Titus never mentioned how afraid he was that in leaving those gifts for her daughter and grandchildren, Crane was saying that she realized she might never see those loved ones again. Then time and again he argued with himself, thinking the old woman hadn’t really been trying to say good-bye, believing they would never meet again.

So each day he wondered how long the Crow would keep them apart, and he worried if Yellow Belly’s band ever would allow Waits-by-the-Water back among her people, back in the arms of her family. For weeks now as winter softened its fury, they had remained no more than a day’s journey from the village. When it migrated to a new campsite—requiring more wood and water, more grass for their herds—Bass packed up his family and followed, never drawing close enough to cause the camp guards alarm, never working streams so close that the Crow village might spoil his trapping haunts.

Camping no more than a day’s ride from her people … just in case they might have a change of heart.

Every few days as he tended to his trapline, Scratch went to some high ground to scour the country for sign of the camp, the lodge smoke, any horsemen out for game until the Crow had run all the game out of the area. Sometimes the hunters, or those scouts who constantly patrolled the hills and ridges for sign of their enemies, would run across the lone white man at work in the icy streams, or on his way back to his camp with his beaver pelts. Never did those hunters come anywhere close enough that he could make sign, much less call out to them. Instead, they always stopped upon recognizing the trapper, turned about, and rode off.

Over and over he reminded himself that he couldn’t blame them. As cruel as it must feel to his woman, Scratch told himself he didn’t have the right to blame her people for their fear of him—and what poison they believed he represented.

After all they had somehow heard about the horrors of the pox, both those tribal legends of long ago and the fresh tales of summer’s terror on the upper Missouri, the Crow had reason to be cautious. Worse still, this new calamity fed the superstitious fear of those among the Crow who proclaimed there was now every excuse to drive the white men out of Absaroka. More and more of the Crow were ready to believe the leaders who spoke against the trappers and traders.

Where he once was welcomed, now he was feared, shunned, even hated. Perhaps Waits-by-the-Water did not truly know what hate was because she had never before experienced the hatred of others. Bass doubted she herself had ever hated anyone before. But he knew full well the power of hate. He understood how hate goaded a man into acts of revenge against those he despised, or acts of retribution against those who despised him.

Titus hoped she remained innocent, hoped she never knew either side of hate.

Sadness rode with them that winter—which meant that its handmaiden, called bitterness, could not be far behind.

That morning she didn’t say much in either tongue as the wolf awoke him before dawn. Titus pulled on his clothing, then quietly told her he would not return before sundown. He kissed her, feeling something in Waits-by-the-Water’s embrace of her longing to explain how bewildered she was. Instead of speaking, however, she only held him tight, kissed his mouth, then released him to the darkness.

As the black became gray, Bass dismounted, tied the horse and mule to the brush, then trudged toward the creekbank. The only sounds in the forest were his footsteps on the sodden snow, the slur of his elk-hide coat brushing against the leafless branches as he neared his first set. Of a sudden he grew concerned.

Standing at the snowy edge of the stream, he couldn’t make out the trap pole he had driven into the bottom of the creek several feet from the bank. Kneeling as he shoved his right sleeve to the elbow, Scratch stuffed his bare forearm into the ice-slicked water. Back and forth he carefully fished, his fingers searching—unable to feel the square bow of the iron trap, the wide springs, the pan or trigger or long chain.

“Goddamned beaver got away with it,” he grumbled as he got to his feet, flinging water off his arm before it turned to ice.

Later, when the light grew, he’d come back and wade on into this wide part of the stream, to try locating where in this flooded meadow the animal had dragged his trap. Somewhere out there in the faint smear of dawn one of the creatures had freed the trap from the pole, then drowned, sinking to the bottom with the weight locked around its paw. It was only a matter of his wading far enough, long enough, in the icy water to find both trap and beaver.

For the time being there was enough work pulling up the other fourteen traps, taking yesterday’s catch back to camp for his wife to begin her work fleshing, graining, and stretching. That started, he could return and look for his trap. As costly as such hard goods were in the mountains, a man simply couldn’t stand to lose one of his traps. Sweeping up his rifle and the rawhide trap sack, Scratch backed out of the thick willow and turned upstream.

A moment later he was standing on the bank, staring out at the glistening surface of the water, bewildered that he was getting so old he had forgotten where he had made the second set. Turning on his heel, he peered across the ground, discovering the stake he had driven into the bank to mark the location of his trap sites. Now he whirled, angry and confused, staring at that point where the frozen ground met the surface of the water, gazing into the stream with a squint to search for the tall pole that always marked the extent of the trap chain that prevented the beaver from reaching the safety of his winter lodge. Out there in the deep water, the creatures would drown—

But at this second set there was no pole, no trap. And no beaver.

Angrier still at his growing frustration, Titus flung himself out of the brush and sprinted upstream for the third set. He stood at the stake in the bank and peered at the widening pond pocked with the prickly domes of mud-and-branch beaver lodges. No trap pole there either.

Furious, he shoved his right arm into the water where he found only the narrow shelf he had carved for the trap. Empty.

Flinging water from the sleeve, he stood and whirled around, his breath coming hard. Heart pounding faster.

And in the light of day-coming Scratch spotted the tracks.

Hurtling forward, he pitched to his knees among them, studying the hoofprints, the moccasin tracks, blowing a little crusty, ice-laden snow out of the prints. Yesterday.

He had come across some tracks two days back, a heavy man riding a pony with a cracked hoof. Altogether there were more than ten horses and riders making that trail he had discovered a good distance north of the Crow village. Hunters were all over that part of the country. Likely the Crow were keeping an eye on him too.

But now he found evidence that same pony, if not the same rider, had visited his traps just yesterday, even though Bass’s camp and this stream were both east of the Crow village.

Balling a fistful of snow in his mitten, Titus stood and flung the snowball angrily at the ground. The bastards for sure spied on him. Circling his camp. And now they’d even gone to honey-fuggling with his trap sites, taken to stealing his traps. Three of them would take some plews for a man to replace, especially when that man was already down three traps.

Feeling his anger rising to fever pitch, Scratch feared the Crow had taken them all. Every last one of his traps, from every one of his sets, along with the beaver snared in them.

Pretty damned plain. No longer were they merely content to hold him at arm’s length. Not satisfied to keep an eye on him and prevent him from infecting them. Now the warriors were beginning their campaign to drive him off, muscle him as far away as they could, right on out of Absaroka. Away from her people.

Standing there over those tracks around the fourth set, his blanket mittens gripping the stock of the big flintlock, Bass sensed he held his deepest fury for Strikes-in-Camp. This was no way for the son of a bitch to treat his sister.

The first rays of the sun suddenly pierced the timber, sending shafts of saffron light across the snow, illuminating every hoofprint, every moccasin track. Eight, ten, maybe as many as a dozen—horses and riders. Goddamned bastards. They’d skulked around behind his back, waited for him to put in all the time to prepare and make his set, watched him turn his back and leave for camp, then swooped on down and robbed him.

Cowards! Traveling in packs like predators, sneaking up behind him—afraid to take him on even though they would have him on the downside of some bad odds. That was all part of their plan, he figured. They didn’t want to confront him in the open, so they committed their foul deeds in secret. Probably even Yellow Belly or the warrior-society chiefs left orders that the white man was not to be hurt, even killed, because he had once been a friend of the Crow. And, after all, he did have a Crow wife. Better to steal what they could from him, make it so tough to work his traplines that he’d pack up and ride off for other country.

Would he surprise them!

Just as soon as he rode back to camp to tell Waits-by-the-Water he wouldn’t be returning that night—not until late the following day because he had a long way to ride—he planned to tear right into that village and demand his property.

And if they didn’t allow him into the camp, if they didn’t return what was his … why, goddamn them niggers—there’d be some dead Crow!

How many thieving red niggers was an iron trap worth?

One for one? Or maybe as high as two of them smart-assed, cocky bucks for every trap they stole from him?

Angry as he was getting with every mile, Bass figured any of them got in his way, they’d find out this was one white man more dangerous than any of the white man’s smallpox.

“Keep the guns near you,” he reminded his wife as he tied the last knot on Samantha’s packsaddle.

She gazed up at his face. “Where are you going?”

“Til be back before the sun sets tomorrow.”

“Why is your face like a stone, husband?”

He tried to smile, but it didn’t work, so he turned away so she would not see his eyes.

“Is your heart an angry stone too?” she asked. “Are you riding somewhere because of your anger?”

“Yes,” he said, knowing he could not tell her a lie. The best he could do was to keep from telling her all of the truth. “I’ll be back by sundown tomorrow.”

She had pressed herself against him, clutching desperately. He sensed her fear, and in that moment Bass felt deeply guilty for the leaving. Since her own people had shunned her, Waits-by-the-Water had no one else but him. Now he was riding off without explaining, leaving her feeling as alone and lonely as she had ever felt.

He whispered, his lips against the top of her head, “Have Magpie help you with the boy.”

But the little girl at his side heard and wrapped herself around his leg. “Come soon to us?”

“Yes,” he said, bending to kiss her forehead.

Then he pressed his mouth against Waits-by-the-Water’s, turned, and vaulted into the saddle. Kicking his pony out of camp, Bass knew he could not turn and look back.

He wanted this to be over. Not just to have his traps returned, but to have his wife and children back with Waits-by-the-Water’s family and people. Disillusioned that everything could not be as it was before, Scratch started cross-country for the Crow village, knowing that he could be there before sundown if he stopped to rest the animals no more than twice on this journey through the snow.

Shame of it was, he didn’t know who he should be angry at, who he could get his hands on, to bloody them with his bony knuckles, to wrap his fingers around their necks and squeeze the breath right out of them. Who to blame? The sick man who had boarded the St. Peter’s down in the settlements when the company’s summer boat carried the dreaded scourge upriver? Or the booshways at the posts along the high Missouri who ended up putting their future trading dollars ahead of the lives of those tribes they traded with?

Could he blame white men like Gamble and Tullock for being a part of a giant sprawl of cogs, men who were essentially as powerless as he once the prairie fire was ignited? Could he blame the Blackfoot for their suspiciousness, their anger that they were being lied to by the white man when they were ordered to stay away from Fort McKenzie?

But shouldn’t he hold his deepest bitterness for the Crow who turned against their own because she had married a white man?

The Blackfoot and the booshways were already his enemies, already the target of much of his wrath. But what of Tullock and Gamble? If the Crow didn’t return to Fort Van Buren, then the trader was ruined, the company would close the post down, and Samuel was out of a job.

And hadn’t Levi lost enough already? Bass didn’t figure he could hold any bitterness for the old friend who had already paid the highest price a man must pay for another’s mistake.

But the Crow had no goddamned reason to steal his traps, to make it tough on him to provide for his family. Despite their fear of the pox, they had no call to keep the woman and their children from the village. Never could there be any justification strong enough that would allow the Crow to—

He yanked back on the pony’s reins, his breath caught in his chest, ears straining. Samantha blew, wisps of frosty steam jetting from her muzzle. As the sound disappeared, he heard more gunfire. Shouts. Screams and cries.

Scratch turned left, listening. Then right and listened some more.

Muffled by the distance, shielded by the slopes before him—those noises originated from the far side of the knoll that stood between him and the sounds of battle.

“Hep! Hep-hepa!” he bawled at the animal beneath him, and at the mule he yanked into motion.

With a bray Samantha shot into a rolling gait as they burst from the timber at the bottom of the hill, galloping up the slope on a slant, clods of icy snow kicked up by every hoof, streamers of it slapping against his blanket-wrapped leggings. Both animals lunging, their breath chugging as he ripped the long fringed gun case from the muzzle of the rifle, twisting about to stuff the cover beneath his ass.

Reaching the top of the knoll, he peered down, his own breath ragged as he tore back on the reins and stopped the animals.

Here the sounds were more distinct. Beyond, where the creek knotted itself into a horseshoe bend then loosened itself again and disappeared from sight around another hillock, Bass saw blurs of movement. Legs and arms, horse tails and manes, shields and war clubs, lances and bows. Another gun boomed. Indian smoothbore.

Yips and growls of men in a fighting lather. Grunts and wails of the wounded or dying, men left underfoot, abandoned in the war-lust.

Common sense stated that one side of that bloody fracas had to be the Crow. And whoever their enemy was, those Crow warriors appeared to be getting their arses whipped but good.

Stabbing his moccasins into the pony’s ribs, Bass bolted off the crest of the hill, thundering down the slope toward the sparse creek-bottom timber where more of the combatants emerged, fleeing in his direction before they turned and set themselves to meet their attackers.

From their hair, the markings on their clothing, he figured the bunch readying for the onslaught had to be Crow. No more than a handful of them now, if there ever were any more when the scrap had begun. Likely a hunting party, he thought. Maybe even the bunch who had stolen his traps before moseying on back to their village.

Twice their number burst from the shadows at the edge of the timber, shrieking as they fired arrows, flung war clubs and tomahawks at the four Crow still standing, the last to put up a defense. One of the warriors who had his back to Scratch screamed with such fury that it made the tiny hairs stand at the back of Bass’s neck. The warrior was standing there as arrows rained down around him, rallying the others.

Titus reached the bottom ground, yanking the flintlock’s hammer back to full cock.

From the snow at his feet the Crow warrior pulled an enemy arrow, clutched it overhead, and screamed his challenge to those about to overrun him.

With a click Bass set the back trigger.

Then the Crow rammed the arrow point through the long decorative flap at the bottom of his leggings—pinning himself to that spot. This warrior-wanting-to-die was proclaiming he would go no farther. Here he would die, never to retreat unless one of his friends released him from this death vow by pulling up the arrow for him.

The enemy were all over the four Crow in the next heartbeat. No way to tell them apart as Scratch yanked brutally back on the reins, lifting his leg to release Samantha’s lead rope as she burst on past and clattered away, looping to the right in retreat. As his pony quartered to the right as if to follow Samantha down the backtrail, Scratch squeezed the animal with his knees, shoved down on the stirrups—instantly stopping the horse.

By the time he got the rifle to his shoulder and peered down the low top flat of that octagonal barrel, the brave Crow warrior had scrambled to his feet in the midst of his attackers, leaving two of his enemies on the ground. Still there were three, lunging across the bloody snow where they had just smashed in the heads of two of the Crow.

Those odds clearly spelled doom for these last two warriors bravely fighting off what Bass took to be Piegan, all smeared up with paint and güssied with feathers and totems for this bold foray into Absaroka. Likely they’d lain in wait for a small hunting party to come along, then sprung their trap. As much as he hated these two Crow warriors for stealing his traps, Bass figured he hated the Blackfoot even more.

When one of the Piegan pinned the Crow’s arms back, a second warrior closed in with a glittering brass tomahawk raised at the end of his arm.

Sweeping the gun’s muzzle over the pony’s head as it pranced sideways at the edge of the timber, then came to an abrupt halt when he angrily squeezed his knees into its ribs, Bass brushed his fingertip across the front trigger. With a roar and a burst of orange flame, the rifle erupted. Twenty yards away in the open, the warrior with that glittering tomahawk blade vaulted backward into the snow, writhing, clawing at his chest with both hands.

Every warrior jerked around at once—both of the surprised Crow, and those four Blackfoot who were about to complete their slaughter.

In that moment of surprise, one of the Crow swept upward with his knife, catching one of the Blackfoot low in the abdomen, plunging the blade in just above the pubic bone, ripping upward as the startled attacker flailed at his enemy for a heartbeat, then frantically fought to prevent his riven intestines from spilling from the gaping, steamy wound as he collapsed to his knees. Foot by slippery foot of purplish gut oozed over his hands into the reddened snow as the Crow spun on another Blackfoot descending upon him with a stone club.

The other Crow, his arms still imprisoned by an attacker, continued to struggle by kicking both his legs at the last of the Blackfoot who slammed the butt of his English fusil along the Crow’s head—bringing the stunned man to his knees for a moment before the warrior fell onto his face in the snow.

As Bass vaulted off the pony onto the frozen ground, the Blackfoot pitched his rifle aside to pull a short bow from the quiver draped over his right shoulder. As that warrior reached back a second time to snag a handful of arrows from the quiver, the Blackfoot who had locked the Crow’s arms behind him leaped onto the collapsed Crow’s back. As he gripped the warrior’s hair with his left hand, the Blackfoot savagely yanked the Crow’s head back and jerked the knife from the Crow’s own belt.

The muscular neck exposed, the Crow’s eyes widened—staring not at the enemy about to slash his throat … instead the Crow gazed at the onrushing white man.

Swapping the rifle to his left hand, Titus yanked the first of the big pistols from his belt, sweeping back the hammer to full cock with his left forearm an instant before he flung his right hand forward, already in a dead run for the Blackfoot who was flexing his arm downward, looping the blade around the Crow’s neck, inches and an instant from delivering the death blow.

The round lead ball caught the Blackfoot low, just above the bottom rib with an audible crack of bone as it smashed through the Indian’s torso, flinging him off the man he was preparing to kill.

Transfixed, Scratch slid to a halt, staring at the face of the Crow sprawled on the ground, the man whose life he had just saved—

“Ooxpe!” cried the other Crow.

That shrill warning ordering him to shoot snapped something taut within Bass, yanking him about to find the Blackfoot, dropping to a knee, his bowstring snapping forward.

Without thinking, the trapper hurtled sideways—the arrow springing from its rawhide string. As Bass fell sideways, his empty rifle tumbling across the icy snow, the painted shaft hissed through the thick elk-hide coat. Landing hard enough to knock the breath from him, Scratch dragged his shoulders out of the snow, rocking onto a hip as he spotted the second Crow scrambling up behind the Blackfoot who had another arrow already nocked in his string. Titus pulled the second pistol into his empty left hand, crudely dragging the huge dragon’s head hammer backward with his right wrist.

As he looked up, his left arm shooting forward to aim at the bowman, Scratch found the bowstring snapping, flinging its arrow his way. Holding his breath that instant it took to aim, he fired.

The knapped-stone point parted the gray muzzle blast the way a bolt of lightning might tear through a coal-cotton storm cloud. Titus was moving too late. The arrow slammed through his right forearm, the point stabbing him high in the belly.

Collapsing onto his back, Titus yanked back on his arm, freeing the stone tip from his clothing, relieved to find that it had only caused a wound barely deep enough to bleed, penetrating only the skin, not near deep enough to pierce the thick bands of muscle over his gut.

Suddenly he dragged his legs under him, rolled onto his hip, and reached at the back of his belt for a tomahawk to defend himself from—

The bowman was on the ground, struggling beneath the Crow warrior until the Blackfoot’s legs thrashed no more.

The victorious Crow stood over the bowman with a jerk, screaming in triumph as he held aloft the dripping trophy just ripped from the head of his enemy.

Scratch gazed down at his right forearm. From his fingertips all the way to the shoulder, the arm quivered as if with shocking cold. Instead he found this a searingly hot pain, so much so that he swallowed to control his stomach from revolting as he stared down at the arrow piercing the upper part of that forearm. Of a sudden the nausea vanished as he looked up at the second Crow warrior.

“Ti-tuzz!” the young man called as he lumbered off his hands and knees, rising onto his feet to step back from the white man.

“Str … Strikes-in-Camp,” he said, his mouth gone dry and pasty. There was fear in his brother-in-law’s eyes.

“Stay away!”

Bass started to get to his feet. “I don’t want to kill you.”

“Stay back, I tell you!”

Then he stopped where he was, on his knees, heaving breathlessly. “All right—I won’t come any closer. Just … just as long as you give me back what your warriors stole from me.”