Wind Walker

NINE

“They call themselves Marmons,” Titus explained to his wife as they stood at the open gates and watched the two dogs trotting toward the first of the Pioneer Party hoving into view more than a half mile from the stockade.

She did her best to mimic his English. “Mar-mo-o-o-o-ns.”

He quickly glanced over his shoulder at the Cheyenne woman and all the children who had gathered with them to watch the arrival of Brigham Young’s Saints at Fort Bridger. Then Scratch whispered in Crow.

“Gabe took to their chief right off; but I saw him as a hard-faced man,” he declared as the sun shone hot upon them.

As Bass watched the riders approaching through the trees, crossing one small streamlet after another to reach the post, he ruminated on his confidential talk with Bridger some nine days back, late that night after Jim had finished his supper with Brigham Young.

“Not a bad sort,” Gabe had observed as Titus put a few more limbs on the small fire as the summer night grew cold.

“I don’t trust him,” Titus snorted. “None of them others.”

“But I don’t read his sign same as you,” Bridger said.

“Hell no, you wouldn’t,” Bass whispered as they unfurled their robes and blankets in a small copse of willow there beside the Little Sandy. “You just et supper with that preacher, an’ now he’s even got you seein’ angels dancing on the top of a pin.”

Bridger shrugged. “Simmer down, Scratch. He an’ his brethren seem like they’re honest, God-fearin’ folk—just like Whitman.”

“Like Doc Whitman?” Scratch repeated, incredulous. “Now, there was a good man, Gabe. He wasn’t like most ever’ other preacher I knowed: looking down their long noses at you from up on high, with them accusin’ eyes full of fire an’ the air around ’em filled with the smell of sulfur an’ brimstone. No, I’ll be glad to say our fare-thee-wells to this here Brigham Young an’ his pack o’ Marmons come mornin’.”

For a moment, Jim had pursed his lips, then disclosed, “I was hopin’ to talk you into turning around from here.”

“You don’t want me to see you on to the pass, e’en down to the Sweetwater?” he had asked. “I ain’t see’d Devil’s Gate, or that ol’ Turtle Rock in a long time—”

“I was figgering you could take President Young and the rest on to the fort, Scratch,” Bridger admitted. “Since I ain’t got no choice but to keep on my way to Fort John to see about them goods we’re needing for the store, you’ll be the host for me.”

“At your post?”

Jim leaned close to Bass. “I can trust you to show ’em your best manners.”

He didn’t have a good feeling from the start, and it wasn’t getting any better. “I dunno—”

“Treat the Saints good an’ they’ll be on their way in a few days,” Bridger said. “They need some smithin’ done afore they move on. I told President Young you’d fire up the anvil for all they needed, an’ he said they could do it themselves, or pay for your work in coin, or take it out in trade. They brung ’em plenty of supplies along, so maybe you can take a look over what they got to trade for. See what the women needs the most in the store, an’ swap out your work for the goods.”

“You’re sure ’bout makin’ these Marmons welcome like this, Gabe?”

“I get back from Fort John, I’ll make it good by you.”

“Not that,” he whispered with a correcting shake of his head, “I mean, do you got your mind made up to help these here Marmons gonna set up their promised land right at your back door?”

“They ain’t gonna be no trouble, not like Utes or Bannocks, raising hell an’ running off with my stock if I give ’em the chance!” Bridger snorted. “The Saints only got a differ’nt God than you an’ me, Scratch. Hell, this here Brigham Young really ain’t no differ’nt from a Snake or ’Rapaho medicine man. Some shake a rattle or look at the dried blood in the belly of a badger for some sign of the One Above.”

Bass scoffed, “An’ this here Brigham Young listens to all that his angels tell him about what God wants him to tell all his flock.”

Jim’s brow knitted. “Where you get these notions ’bout angels an’ his flock?”

“While you was havin’ supper with your Prophet, them others had a hold on my ear, telling me all ’bout this here Brigham Young bein’ the only one what knows the true word of God meant for the ears of man,” Titus confided sourly. “Damn, but they was preachin’ hard at Titus Bass. Harder’n any preaching I ever got whipped on these ol’ ears. Made my head ache with all their Urim an’ Thummin. Hell, they claimed they was the only folks bound to sit on a throne in glory. Angels named Moroni an’ Nephi … Gabe, this bunch wuss’n all the hell an’ brimstone preachers I knowed back in Kaintuck. These Marmons don’t holler sayin’s outta the Bible like McAfferty or Bill Williams neither! They got their own book they was thumpin’ an’ drummin’ on—”

“Young showed it to me. Where they get called Mormons—from their own book on the word from God,” Bridger said with an unmasked enthusiasm in his voice. “He said they still believe in the Bible, but it’s older, an’ their book is a newer word of God, meant for them what’s chose for heaven here in the latter days.”

For a moment, Titus had carefully studied his old friend. “Young change you into Marmon?”

Jim smiled and leaned forward to say in a hush, “Hell no, Scratch. But I give the man my manners an’ listened to all he had to say. We talked some more about the country an’ the Injuns an’ crops they could grow down there south of Utah Lake, but in atween it all he was giving me a sharp lesson on all they believed an’ why he’s brought his people out of Missouri—”

“Missouri!” Scratch interrupted. “Why, them Marmons hate Missouri an’ all the folks in that country! Afore I had my fill of supper for all they was poundin’ in my ears, they told me the Garden of Eden—where Adam an’ Eve was birthed by God—why, it was right outside where ol’ Fort Osage stood, near the mouth of the Blue River, on the Missouri! No preacher I ever heard spout a sermon back in Kaintuck ever come anywhere close to saying God started the hull world back yonder on the banks of the Missouri River!”

“An’ a Snake medicine man claims he can pull a evil spirit right out of a man’s mouth so he ain’t sick no more,” Jim argued. “These here Mormons just got their own way of seeing God, an’ Brigham Young says they only wanna be left alone by folks who don’t understand ’em.”

“You sure you ain’t gone Marmon on me?”

With a shake of his head, Bridger stated flatly, “No. I been out here in the Rocky Mountains too long to swaller talk about angels coming down from the clouds an’ Eden at our back door, an’ one prophet gonna talk to God hisself so he can tell me which way my stick floats an’ what don’t smell o’ horse apples.”

“We’re too damn old to change our ways now,” Titus observed, feeling a bit reassured.

“Maybeso a old beaver trapper like me can make a life for hisself helping them emigrants bound for Oregon,” Jim admitted. “But I ain’t gonna change who I am or what I come to believe in after more’n twenty winters out here.”

He plopped a gnarled hand on Bridger’s knee and said fraternally, “Time was, I didn’t figger I wanted nothing to do with no emigrants comin’ through in their wagons, stirring up the buffler an’ bringing their white women to the mountains. But, long as them sodbusters keep right on going west to Oregon an’ don’t dally long in our country, I can help some corncrackers on their way to their own promised land on the Columbia.”

Jim grinned in the moonlight. “So we’ll both hold our tongue an’ help these here Saints find the promised land they chose for themselves. Them others, did they give you some bread with your supper?”

“It was mighty tasty, I do admit,” Scratch said as he lay on his side in the starlight. “Been some time since I ate white folks’ bread.”

“When I sat down with Brigham Young, I told him I ain’t see’d so much bread in years,” Bridger confessed as he lay back on his blankets. “So he asked me, ‘But, Mr. Bridger, how do you live without bread?’”

“What’d you tell ’im, Gabe?”

“Told him we live on meat. Dry our deer and buffler to eat in the lean times. And we also cook fresh when we can get it. Told him we have coffee to drink most of the time, for that we can have plenty of that brung out here.”

They lay in silence for a long time, until Scratch asked once again, “You’re sure ’bout bein’ so friendly to these here strangers?”

“Yes,” he answered in the dark. “Way out here on this side o’ the mountains, we ought’n treat other folks the way we wanna be treated ourselves, Scratch.”

Titus sighed, then said, “Long as it’s gonna help my friend, Jim Bridger … an’ don’t ever hurt you to open your door to this here Brigham Young.”

“Them Mormons gonna be putting down their roots and setting up shop so far south from here,” Jim explained, “we’ll never hear a sound from ’em.”

Titus Bass went to sleep that night, wanting to believe that every bit as much as his friend did.

But for the last nine days that little wary voice of warning was about all Titus had brooded on as he stayed just far enough ahead of the column’s vanguard that he would discourage any company as he dragged these saints of the latter days beyond that fateful meeting with Gabe and on toward Fort Bridger on Black’s Fork. It was just past midafternoon when Scratch had recognized the faraway river bluffs. He immediately turned about and covered that quarter mile back to the head of the march where Brigham Young and a half dozen of his Apostles rode.

“You’ll spy Jim’s post when you round the bend in the river,” Bass announced as he reined his horse around and brought it up near the group of riders. “I’m goin’ on to see to my family. Let ever’body know you’ll be comin’ soon.”

“Your family?” Young echoed. “You have an Indian wife like Major Bridger? Half-breed children too?”

His eyes narrowed at the judgmental tone the stocky man took. “Crow. My family’s Crow.”

“Are they a tribe from this part of the country?” asked Elder Woodruff.

He wagged his head. “North of here. Far … north of here.”

William Clayton stated, “Another band of Lamanites we’ve read about, President Young.”

“Band of what?” Titus asked.

“Lamanites,” Clayton repeated.

“Indians, Mr. Bass,” Young declared. “The red man, his women and children. They are a lost tribe of Israel—banished to this wilderness because they refused to turn their ears to the continued revelations of God.”

He tried out the word, “Lay-man …”

“Lamanites,” Clayton pronounced it correctly for the old trapper.

Titus asked, “All that what some Lamanite tol’t your people back east?”

Young smiled that same hard smile he wore most of the time, the sort of smile a man would use when he was scolding a disobedient child. “No, Moroni appeared to our founder and told him the word of God was meant for His chosen here in these latter days. For hundreds of years the world has not heeded God, but now these faithful, holy people have been raised up by the Almighty to forge a trail west—following a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night, just as the thousands followed Moses out of bondage in Egypt to their Promised Land.”

So Scratch had peered this way and that in the sky that afternoon, and saw no pillar of cloud. Nor had he seen any pillar of fire blazing in the sky after the Pioneer Party had made their camp each evening.

Yet, even while there had been no fire in the heavens for the past nine nights, there was no mistaking the flames in Brigham Young’s eyes as he gazed into the distance and caught sight of something to make his case to the faithful.

“There, Mr. Bass,” the Prophet declared as he pointed up the valley. “Behold—there is your pillar of cloud.”

With murmurs of assent and wonder, Titus looked on up the valley of Black’s Fork. A thin column of woodsmoke arose from the direction of Fort Bridger. A cold chill tumbled down his spine, so cold and shocking it reminded him of stepping into a beaver pond in spring, cracking a thin layer of ice with his moccasins as he waded in to his crotch, numbing everything from his waist down. He looked again at Brigham Young, at the Prophet’s faithful, who were pointing and muttering in agreement that they were indeed seeing the pillar of cloud God had put before them, leading them onward to their Promised Land.

Chimney smoke.

Titus wagged his head and put heels to his horse. As the big red pony loped toward Fort Bridger, the old man did his best to pray that the Prophet and his chosen few would soon spot more woodsmoke to continue them on their way, to lead them far from the valley of Black’s Fork, to take their kind on to a distant kingdom of their own … so they could not possibly lay waste to the simple, earthly dreams of his old friend, Jim Bridger.

“Think of the trade my flock can offer you and Major Bridger as we bring the Saints through this wilderness to Zion, marching those thousands right past your gates!” extolled the Prophet.

Bass’s heavy hammer clanged against the short, glowing strip of band iron one last time, a splatter of crimson fireflies spewing from the anvil, a few of them snuffing themselves out on his grimy, cinder-stained moccasins. Bass laid the hammer on top of the stump where the anvil was perched and dragged the reddish strap of iron to the bucket with a pair of long, leather-wrapped tongs. As the crimson metal sissssed into the bubbling water, Titus dragged the back of his right forearm over his eyes, smearing beads of moisture and blackened cinders across the top half of his face. Droplets of sweat had begun to sting his eyes already irritated by the thick smoke. No matter that he couldn’t see with the left, both eyes still burned fiercely as he worked over fire and iron, flame and muscle.

“Jim’s gonna be some pleased with that,” he sighed, wishing the Saints would turn away and leave him to his work.

“Our migration to Zion should more than guarantee Major Bridger a handsome profit for a short season’s work,” Young continued, his thumbs hooked in the top pockets of his vest. “Those Gentiles going on to … the emigrants going on to Oregon or perhaps to California will only be the sauce for what income you can make from our faithful.”

He dragged the iron from the bucket with those tongs, turning the wide hub band this way, then that, inspecting it closely before he stepped over to the fire hopper and began hauling down on the long bellows handle he had repaired just this morning, bringing his coals to full heat. As he yanked down again and again in rhythm with his heartbeat, Scratch let his eyes bounce from man to man to man, across all eight of those who had followed Brigham Young to this shady corner of the post, all of them standing there like a broad-shouldered, multiheaded shadow, having tagged along behind their leader, hanging on his every word, whim, and need, as if Young’s every utterance was the very breath of God itself.

“What’s this Gen-tile?” he asked as the coals began to glow anew with the infusion of air.

Young cleared his throat. “A Gentile is a non-Mormon. One who has not yet come to the faith that will save him everlasting.”

“Me? I’m a Gentile?”

“What faith are you, Mr. Bass?”

“I don’t figger there’s a name I can rightly put on it.”

“Were you raised up with any church teaching?”

“My ma, she tried hard,” Titus explained. “With me an’ her other young’uns. But I s’pose your kind would call her a Gentile—no matter that she was as good an’ God-fearin’ a woman as ever walked this earth.”

“I would never mean to give offense—”

“Much as she tried to get the Bible into my head an’ part o’ my heart,” Bass continued without waiting for Young to finish, “I fell into the life what snared most boys I knowed on the frontier, snared ’em same as me. Whiskey an’ wimmens. Bad whiskey and even badder wimmens.”

He liked watching how those temporal, carnal words landed on their ears: the averted eyes, the downturned faces, as each man did his best to stare at the ground; a few gazed upward as if asking for heaven to cast its gloried benevolence on this pagan sinner, perhaps even asking for a thunderbolt to be sent from above to strike down this blasphemer.

“Even Mary, the mother of Christ Jesus, was an apostate from the true church,” Young instructed. “She herself was not redeemed by the blood of her son.”

“He was the one they nailed on the cross, weren’t he?”

With a smile, the Prophet nodded. “Yes. The Christ Jesus, who married the two Marys and Martha too before He was betrayed and crucified … married all three, whereby He could sow His seed before He ascended to the right hand of God.”

“My mam didn’t ever teach me Jesus was married afore,” Bass admitted as he studied the iron band again. “Havin’ three wives, hmmm—sounds to me like you’re saying Jesus wasn’t satisfied to be with just one woman.”

“Do you doubt that Christ Jesus married the three?”

He shrugged and replied, “I don’t know enough ’bout anything to answer your questions. I’m just a simple man who manages to sin a lot—”

“What sin was once in a man’s heart is of no bearing to God,” Brigham Young replied. “And therefore of no bearing to me. It’s what a man decides to become that marks him for the Lord’s work—”

“It ain’t a case of what I’ll become, you best unnerstand. It’s what I am that I’ll allays be.”

The Prophet took a step closer, holding out his hands before him, palms up. “Look at these hands, Mr. Bass. Once these were the hands of a carpenter. I too was a simple man with the hands of a carpenter.” He looked up from staring at his palms. “Did you know Jesus was a carpenter Himself?”

“Before you say He married them three women?”

“Christ Jesus—the Savior who came to the New World after He was crucified,” Young extolled. “He appeared to God’s chosen to tell them how all others in the land of Old Israel had forsaken Him and His promise. So Jesus left them with a new promise, and that word is told in our holy book. How Adam was God, conceived on the great star of Kolob, the site for the conception of all the gods. The most amazing story of all is told in our book, Mr. Bass.”

He wagged his head and turned back to the coals, dragging the iron strip out of the fire again and looping its crescent over the end of the anvil. “I don’t read much. Ain’t since I come out here.”

“One of the Apostles could read some of the holy book to you—”

“I got work to do.”

But Young was not easily deterred. “While you continue with your work.”

“I’m too old—”

“No man should deny himself a chance at eternal life, especially when he grows long in the tooth, Mr. Bass.”

He picked up the hammer and gave the red-hot crescent a slam, sparks sputtering from the anvil. “I am what I am, Preacher. I see what I see, an’ I hear what I hear. No man can see or hear for me.”

“But you can see the truth, hear the truth of our word, and judge for yourself as the many who have already made a stand for the new nation of Israel.”

Again and again his hammer rang against the crimson metal he inched around the anvil, slowly tightening the crescent into a solid circle the size he would need to work onto a wagon’s wheel hub. “I been out here since twenty-five …” and the hammer rang. “I seen things with my own eyes …” that hammer rang again. “Things I’d never dreamed … back east … heard an’ smelled an’ felt … all manner of things out here … things what wasn’t really there … they’s called ghosts … or shades … or hoo-doos—”

“Spirits, Mr. Bass,” Young interrupted. “Like the Holy Spirit that will enter your bosom and seize your heart with a fire of unquenchable flame.”

“Hoo-doos or spirits … no matter what you call ’em … that sort of thing may give a man like you … the willies an’ shakes … but such ghosty doin’s don’t make no nevermind … to the peoples out here … out to these here mountains … the red folks ain’t the kind to preach an’ push … what they have in their heart … push it on me the way you preachers push … a man’s medeecin is his medeecin … so who the blazes am I … to make so little of what another man carries … in his heart … who the hell am I to say … what makes him a man? … or to say I’m a man … an’ he ain’t?”

“I’ve attempted to explain to you where the Lamanites have been judged wrong, where the Indians, the cursed ones of this continent, came from and how God turned His face from them because they turned their faces from His true word,” Young said impatiently as he stepped around the side of the anvil to gaze directly into the trapper’s face. “The Indian believes in the sanctity of his beliefs about his world because he is in a state of ignorance—he knows not the word of God, Mr. Bass. Be careful, very careful, you do not covet the ignorance of these savages, or you are a heathen yourself, destined for the pit of fire. The reason these heathens can’t spread the healing power of their teaching is because they have no knowledge of the one true God.”

Scratch slammed the hammer down on the red-hot iron with a vengeance. “Their God is the same as yours, Preacher.”

Young’s face brightened with that benevolent smile that made Bass realize the Prophet believed he was ministering unto a lesser man, one who was every bit as ignorant as a heathen Indian, totally unworthy of salvation for the color of his skin.

“No,” the Prophet argued, “the spirits of these Indians are not the same as the one true Creator. These red savages live in a state of ignorance, for there will be no happy hunting ground for them when they die without the salvation of the word.”

From the corner of Scratch’s eye, the old trapper spotted his wife step from the open doorway of the store and stop against the building, then slowly settle to the half-log bench propped against the cabin wall. Waits-by-the-Water smiled at him, then closed her eyes and turned her face up to the warming sun. Apparently very much at peace.

Turning back to Brigham Young, he asked, “Your God an angry God, Preacher?”

For a moment, Young appeared to heft his thoughts around like a carpenter might take the measure of the grain in a piece of wood. “Yes, at times He can be an angry, vengeful God. When He alone determines He will smite the unrighteous—”

“What of all them sinners back to Missouri?” Titus asked as he continued to hammer on those last few inches of iron. “Other places too … where the folks riz up … an’ throwed you Marmons out? Why didn’t your God … smite them Gentiles … why did your God … make it so hard on your people?”

That question startled the Prophet. He quickly glanced at those followers around him with a look that Titus figured was Young’s wondering if any of them had explained the story of their years of travail to this ignorant Gentile.

“It is not for a man to know the inner workings of the heart of God, Mr. Bass,” he finally answered. “I suppose it will all be revealed to us in due time.”

“Maybeso, not in your lifetime?”

Young finally nodded. “Perhaps not in my lifetime, yes. But just as Moses led his Israelites to the Promised Land but could not cross over, this might not be revealed to me before I close my eyes and take my final breath … then stand at the foot of the throne of God, when all things will finally be revealed to me.”

Titus sighed, “Some things just meant to be a … a mystery, Preacher.”

“Mystery, you say?”

In the tongs Bass held up the small hoop of iron that had lost all its crimson glow. Suspended between the two of them. The anointed Prophet and the dirt-ignorant old trapper. “Most ever’ kind of folk I come to know out here—man, an’ woman too—they figger what they can’t wrap their minds around ain’t for ’em to unnerstand.”

“But God has clearly shown mankind that He wants us to understand.”

“Where’s this hoop start, Preacher?”

“Why—clearly at the end you curved in.”

“Did your own hoop start when you was born?”

“My … hoop?” he asked with the sort of smile one would wear when answering the questions of a young child.

For a moment Scratch considered how best to explain that simple concept to this self-assured preacher. “The long journey your own spirit takes—ain’t it like a hoop? You’re born, live your life good as you can, then you die. So did your own hoop start when you was born?”

Young cleared his throat and reflected. “Certainly … no, it didn’t. My spirit yearned for a place among God’s faithful and chosen people at this very time in history.”

“You’re saying you was somewhere else on this hoop when you was born?”

“I don’t understand your point, Mr. Bass—”

“An’ where will you be on the hoop when you die and stand before the throne of your God?”

It was indeed a hot midsummer day—nonetheless the Prophet’s brow was sweating a little too much for a man who was doing nothing to physically exert himself.

Titus asked again, holding the iron band slightly higher, “Where will you be?”

“When I die I will be in heaven with all God’s faithful saints. Right where you can be if you accept His revealed word.”

“So you do got a beginning and an end, Preacher?”

“As do all God’s creatures.”

“Me too? A ignernt Gentile like me?”

“Yes.”

Bass lowered the hoop. “How ’bout my Injun wife and our young’uns?”

“Yes, they have a glorious end in paradise once they accept the teachings of God.” Young smiled again, as if beginning to feel more at ease.

“You take this here circle,” Titus began, gazing at that iron hoop, “why, this here’s my life, preacher. Just like my coming out here to the mountains was a part of the journey. No beginning an’ no end.”

“But in death—”

“When I die, my body goes back to the earth, don’t it?”

“That’s the way of all mortal clay, yes.”

“But my spirit goes on,” he said quietly. “Like the earth and sky. That don’t die, does it, Preacher?”

Young corrected, “Your soul goes to live with God in His heavenly paradise prepared for us.”

“I don’t want my soul—my spirit—to go nowhere,” he said with grave intensity. “I want it to stay right here where I been the happiest I ever could be.”

“There’s far more happiness in heaven with the rest of the faithful souls—”

“Maybe for you an’ your Saints, but for me I don’t wanna be nowhere but here with these rocks and sky, here with the ones I hold in my heart. There ain’t no other heaven, no other paradise for me to be in for all time.”

“I … see,” Young stated, then dragged a single fingertip along his upper lip beaded with tiny diamonds of sweat. “Elders—we see how the Holy Spirit can only speak to a man if his ears are not plugged.”

“It ain’t that my ears are plugged,” Titus replied. “I s’pose I just hear a differ’nt voice than you heard, Preacher.”

Throwing his shoulders back self-confidently, Young said, “The devil himself can whisper in your ear, Mr. Bass. What has that evil voice you hear been saying to you?”

“It said I don’t need no other man to tell me what I need to hear, to see what I need to see.”

“Then you will not trust to the word of God revealed through his chosen Prophet?”

“Who’s telling me it’s the word of God?”

He spread his hand upon his chest, “Why, those men God has anointed as His spokesmen here on earth—in the way of prophets, the way it has been since the earliest days of man on this earth.”

“The earth was here first? An’ the sky too?”

“Of course,” Young agreed.

“Then that’s the way it must be for me too,” Bass admitted. “If the earth an’ the sky was here first, they’ll be here through the end of time. I want my spirit to last as long. The way I seen how Injuns look at all there is around ’em. Makes more sense to me than all your glory an’ Thummin’ an’ your angel Moroni blowin’ his horn.”

“He announces the coming of the—”

“I hear my God speak to me good enough in a whisper, Preacher.”

Young worked his lower jaw around several times as if chewing on the words he was considering giving voice, but finally said with great finality, “So be it, Mr. Bass. Many times in our troubled past we have been told by God that not all men will hear His call. Some have their ears plugged to God’s glory.” He sighed and started to shamble around the anvil, his bearded jaw jutting. “Here on the doorstep to Zion—I am once more reminded that we cannot save everyone, my brothers. Even these simplest lambs lost forever in the eternal wilderness.”

Bass watched the Prophet and his Apostles turn aside and shuffle off toward the store. He plunged the iron hoop into the water. This time it barely raised a hiss or a bubble; it had cooled as he held it out before him in the tongs. Then he looked up to watch their backs as they stepped past Waits, each of them in turn touching the brim of their hats before they disappeared, one by one, absorbed by the shadows of that doorway. She turned and got to her feet, pushing a wisp of hair back from her damp brow, tucking it beneath that hair, which was pulled into one of her braids as she started his way.

“Ti-tuzz,” Waits said as she ducked into the shade of the low awning of tree branches suspended above his blacksmith shop. “Your face is troubled.”

It took him a moment to put his mind on the Crow she spoke at him, his head swollen with matters most heavenly … bringing his thoughts back to the temporal present. With a clatter he laid the hoop and tongs upon the anvil and let her step inside his damp, gritty arms.

“These men,” she said with her cheek against his neck, “they are not like any of your kind ever come out here before.”

“You are right,” he replied softly in Crow. “This is a whole new breed of horse. Not trappers, not even stiff-necked traders with their whiny ways. No, this is a high-nosed breed, woman.”

“They are not staying here at Blanket Chief’s lodge?” she asked, using her tribe’s appellation for Bridger. “They will be gone soon?”

“A few days at the most, then they will go on to a new country they are looking for.”

“Will they turn north, or south? Or go on far to the west where Blanket Chief says the trail people always go—toward the sun’s resting place?”

“No, these are not going on to the place the others go,” he explained. “This new breed is turning south from here to find the land their god has picked out for them.”

“It is good for them,” she said with a soft smile. “The First Maker has picked out a place for every people to be. He gave the Crow the very best place.”

He smiled too at his mind’s image of an old friend. “I remember Rotten Belly telling me how Crow country was in just the right place: to the north the winters were too cold; to the south the summers were too long; to the west were enemies and the mountains were too tall; while to the east the water was not good.”

“Was Arapooesh right?”

He combed his fingers along one of her braids wrapped in sleek otter skin and peered down into her eyes. “I have journeyed far, far to the north—up near the country of the Blackfoot where the English trade. And far, far to the south where the Apache roam the mountains and valleys. I have gone all the way to the end of the land where the deep, white-ruffled ocean touches the last place a man can stand with dry moccasins. And many times you have asked me to tell you about that country where I was born far to the east. Sometimes when I think of all the country I have traveled, all the mountains and rivers, valleys and deserts I have crossed in my seasons, my head starts to hurt with the remembering of so much … far more than one man can hold in his mind.”

“Have you ever found a better place than Crow country for Ti-tuzz?”

Taking her face gently in both of his rough, weathered, cinder-blackened hands, Scratch said, “That’s what I am trying to tell you, ua.” He used the intimate word for spouse. “There is no better place, and all other country I have seen is dimmed by the beauty of that wild land we call our home.”

“I miss my country,” she admitted. “But I would miss you more if I were not with you.”

“I promised to take you with me, everywhere I go—and our children too. Until our little ones grow and they are gone with lives of their own, we will be together.”

“Magpie will be first,” she said with a mother’s resignation. “Although she professes that she never wants to go.”

“Yes. One day soon she will admit that she is ready to leave us.”

“Perhaps when she gives her heart away, as a woman will do for the man she loves.”

Titus squeezed her, then said, “And Flea will be next—when he grows old enough to be with other young warriors and sleep in a shelter of his own.”

“That will happen before he even picks a wife,” she speculated.

“And little Jackrabbit,” he said. “But, that time seems so distant now that it is hard to see even with far-seeing eyes.”

Waits shifted her weight a little self-consciously and asked, “So what of Jackrabbit’s little brother or sister?”

“It would be a long, long time before that child would be ready to leave its mother and father.”

Then she pulled away from him slightly, within arm’s length, so she could hold his wrists and gaze into his eyes. “So what child do you hope Jackrabbit will have? A little brother, or a little sister?”

“He is in his fifth summer, so what do you think Jackrabbit would like most?”

“I think he would like a little sister.”

“And why would a boy want to have a little sister?”

“I only know that I want another baby girl,” she confessed.

“Yes,” he said in a whisper. “Magpie was so dear. Girls are very different from boys. A sister for Jackrabbit would be good.”

“But,” she said, the smile gone from her eyes, “you would not be disappointed if Jackrabbit has a little brother?”

He began to look at her strangely, something gradually coming into focus for him the way he would twist on that last section of his spyglass as he brought a distant object into the sharpest focus. He did not realize his mouth was hanging open until she placed a fingertip beneath his chin and pushed it closed for him. With other fingers she took hold of his hand, moved it down to her belly.

“I first came to know while you were gone with Blanket Chief, taking Shell Woman to Sweete,” she explained as she pressed his palm flat against her soft, rounded belly with both of hers.

He stood there, still speechless.

“So this morning while you talked with these strange white men as you worked,” Waits continued, “I sat in the sun, closed my eyes, and made a prayer of my own.”

Bass swallowed hard. “Y-yes?”

“I prayed that you would find joy in this news.”

“H-how could I not?” he exclaimed. “You are … we are? Another baby?”

She nodded, unable to speak at that moment, the tears starting to spill down her high-boned, copper-skinned cheeks.

Immediately he wrapped his arms around her in a fierce embrace, hoisting her off the ground in a half circle before he plopped her back down on the dirt of that open-air blacksmith shop at Fort Bridger.

“H-how soon will this child come?”

“Winter,” she said, a little breathless. “Maybe as early as your day of birth, but probably later.”

“Winter,” he repeated, then suddenly kissed her, hard, on the mouth, and quickly dropped to his knees before her, pressing his cheek and ear against that slightly rounded belly.

“Do you want this child born in Crow country?”

She used both her hands to gently cup the top of that faded blue bandanna tied around his head. “This child will choose its own place to be born, Ti-tuzz. If we are back among my people, or if we are somewhere else of our choosing—this child will decide.”

He pressed his mouth against her soft belly and kissed it.

“No matter where we are when the child’s time comes, as long as we are all together there,” she said as he got to his feet once more, “then it will be as the First Maker has intended.”

“I will be there,” he promised, tears stinging his eyes as he painfully remembered not being with her when she gave birth to Jackrabbit. “For you, I will always be there.”