Wind Walker

TWENTY-FOUR

“T-T-Ti-tuzz!” Waits whispered softly.

As he awoke Waits-by-the-Water was already huffing—gritting her teeth while her breath came quick and labored. Scratch rolled toward her, onto his right hip, and propped himself up on an elbow, about ready to ask her what troubled her so … then felt the dampness. Slipping a hand between them, his fingers brushed over the blanket she had been sleeping on every night for the past two weeks. Initially he had thought she folded the blanket up in four layers beneath her to provide a little more insulation from the frozen ground.

But that first night she stretched out upon that old red blanket, Waits had explained, “I think this child’s time is soon.”

Now he discovered the blanket below her buttocks was damp, quickly growing chill. Worried, he immediately brought his fingers to his nose and sniffed at them. Not the smell of blood, more so her fragrance.

“How long ago?” he asked as he sat upright.

Her head plopped down onto the horsehair pillow, weary from the effort. “Not long now,” she said, exhaustion apparent in her voice.

“Why didn’t you wake me before?”

She turned to gaze at him in the dim light, a grin written on her face. “What are you going to do to make this any easier for me, husband?”

Turning, he pitched some small pieces of broken limb onto the embers. “I could make more light, warm the lodge for you too.”

He leaned forward, grabbed his long hair in one hand to keep it out of the ash and coals, then blew several times on the fire to excite the flickering flames. “And,” he continued, considering whether he could call upon the services of a midwife, “I could go get Bear Below to help us—to help you give birth to this child.”

Before she had a chance to answer, Waits-by-the-Water looped her hands beneath her thighs and scrunched up with another strong contraction, her eyes clenched shut as she huffed noisily. So noisily he thought she was going to awaken the children. Titus turned and looked at Magpie’s side of the lodge. The girl was already awake, her eyes wide as capote buttons as she watched in silence. He turned to the boys’ side of the lodge, finding Flea’s eyes open. But Jackrabbit hadn’t moved.

“Is your brother awake, Flea?”

The boy looked closely, then said, “No.”

“Let him sleep,” Scratch whispered. “Do you want to stay while your little brother or sister is born?”

For a moment Flea looked across the fire at Magpie, then answered. “I’ll stay here with our mother while she delivers this child.”

“Magpie?” he asked his daughter.

“S-stay,” she confessed. “Last time—when Jackrabbit was born—I was too little to understand. Now I can see, and I want to know how a woman suffers when she gives life to a child.”

“This is a good thing,” he said, but thought better of it and turned back to Waits. “The children, they can stay to watch this event with their own eyes?”

She nodded clumsily, huffing her way through the end of that long contraction. “Y-yes, they can stay with us.”

“Flea,” Scratch directed, “put on your coat and go to Bear Below’s lodge. Tell her your mother’s time has come and we need her here now.”

Carefully crawling over his little brother, Flea sat down next to the rekindled fire and pulled on his heavy, thickly furred winter moccasins. Then he dragged his blanket coat over his arms, stood and lashed it around his waist with a sash before ducking from the lodge door. A cold gust snaked its way through the portal before Flea got the stiffened door flap closed, along with a dusting of powdery flakes.

“It’s snowing again, Magpie,” Bass prodded her. “Get up and come help me.”

She immediately kicked her way out of the blankets and robes, sliding on her knees closer to the fire where she rubbed her hands together over the rekindled warmth. “What can I do, Popo?”

“Bring more of that wood beside the door over here by the fire. You’re going to start heating up some water as I hold your mother while this baby comes.”

After she had begun to drag some of the broken limbs toward the fire pit, Magpie asked, “Did you hold my mother like that while I was being born?”

“I did at first,” he declared. “Then I was shooed out of the room.”

“In Mateo’s house.” She repeated the lesson she had learned in Taos last winter. “And when Flea was born?”

“I always promised her I would be with her when a child’s time came to be born,” he explained. “Except I was a long, long way off when Jackrabbit came along.”

“B-but you did not even know”—Waits huffed—“that I was carrying—your new child when you—left to go trapping that spring.”

“I would have been there for Jackrabbit, Magpie,” he apologized, “if I had known not to go to the land of the Mexican horses. Bring your mother some water to drink.”

He had Waits propped up against him by the time Magpie brought over a half-filled tin cup. After her mother had finished the next long contraction, Waits took a sip of the cold water, then a long drink, letting it wash down her dry throat deliciously. He heard the crunch of footsteps outside, the low murmur of voices just before the heavy, frozen deerhide was dragged aside and in came that spindly leg wrapped in a wool blanket legging, a buffalo moccasin so big that it made her feet look three or four times as big as they really were. Bear Below stood hunched over, one of the old woman’s arms supported by Flea. This was the boy’s eleventh winter, and he had begun to shoot up in the same weedy way his father had when he had been the same age back in faraway Rabbit Hash on the Ohio River.

“Did the boy wake you?” Titus asked.

“I have been waiting for this baby too, so I heard him coming to get me,” the old woman responded, tearing off her coat. “Look at those feet of his!” and she pointed at Flea’s moccasins. “This one could never creep up on anyone!”

She passed her blanket coat to Flea, then started shuffling around the fire pit to the rear of the small lodge. “You have had three births already?”

When Waits could only nod, Titus said, “Yes, this is her fourth birthing.”

“So, child—tell me how it is for you.”

“Not hard. I think this child will come easy.”

“I will see for myself,” Bear Below stated.

She slowly collapsed to her knees on the bedding, squatting at the feet of Waits-by-the-Water, and dragged back the top blanket so she could reach under it with both hands. Closing her wrinkled eyelids, Bear Below turned her head as if staring at the fire with those closed eyes while she felt about. Just about the time Waits began to pant through her nose again, Bear Below said, “That’s good. Let it come over you and carry you with it. Do not tense … do not—that’s it. You must remember not to tense your body, girl. Stay loose and the child will slide on out into this world.”

Bear Below rocked back onto a bony hip and settled there between the upfolded legs of the mother.

“Did you see or feel the child’s head?” Waits inquired.

“Not yet,” the old woman reassured her. “But very soon I think.” Then Bear Below turned to the white man. “Tell me, do you make good coffee?”

“I do—but I want to stay here beside my wife.”

Bear Below shifted her bottom so she could look over her shoulder at Magpie. “What is your name?”

“Magpie.”

“Do you make good coffee?”

She looked at her father, and he nodded. “Y-yes, I … well, my father tells me I do.”

“Make us a pot of your coffee, Magpie.”

As his daughter busied herself with the pot and some coffee grounds they brought north from Fort Bridger, Titus instructed his son, “Bring some more of that wood over here by the fire.”

The pot hadn’t been on the flames very long when Waits-by-the-Water announced, “It-it’s time now.”

Bear Below was already there between the mother’s knees, pushing the blanket off her legs, folding up the bottom of the long hide dress onto the swollen belly so that she had an unobstructed view of the birth opening. “Yes, girl—I think I see the head coming now.”

“I feel him coming!”

“A boy?” Titus asked his wife. “You think this is another boy?”

She nodded as she gulped air, huffing between her gritted teeth.

The old woman cooed, “There you go, easy now. That’s the head. Let’s turn a little and let those shoulders out too.”

Doing his best to keep his wife propped up as he leaned to the side, Titus attempted to get a look at this babe being born.

“You are doing good, mother,” Bear Below cheered as Magpie crabbed up close behind the old woman, looking over her hunched shoulders. “Just a little more. This next time you can push hard for me.”

Staring transfixed on the child emerging into the world, Magpie’s mouth hung open. “Little brother—do you want to see this?”

Flea asked, “Are you talking to me or to Jackrabbit?”

Magpie finally turned, finding Jackrabbit awake on the far side of the lodge, curiously watching the adults. “I was asking you, Flea.”

“N-no. I am fine right here where I am. I can see plenty well right here.”

“It’s a good thing too, Flea,” Titus told his eldest son. “You don’t want to get in the way right now—”

“It is done!” Bear Below cried out, moving that small child out of the shadows and into the fire’s illumination.

“Wh-what do we have for a child?” Waits inquired expectantly when the babe let out a gush of air, then began to howl.

Holding the newborn aloft, the long, purplish umbilical cord descending from its belly to disappear between the mother’s legs, Bear Below announced, “You have another girl!”

Waits began to cry, her tears tumbling off the edge of her face onto his arm. Bass wrapped up his wife in his arms, clutching her against him tightly. Then he slowly lowered her back onto the horsehair pillows and wiped the beads of sweat from her forehead. “We have another girl!”

“Here, white father of this new daughter,” Bear Below grumbled at him. “Hold your baby while I cut this cord and finish delivering this mother.”

Starting to tremble as he held out his hands to the old midwife, Titus felt his tears spill down his hot cheeks, his vision blurring with a salty sting. “L-look, Magpie!” he whispered as the child was laid in his arms. “You have a sister.”

Waits attempted to raise herself onto her elbows. But Bear Below scolded her, “Lay down while I finish the birthing, girl.”

So the new mother asked her husband, “Which of us does she favor?”

Bear Below looked up, her eyes briefly assaying Magpie. “Your oldest daughter—she clearly favors her mother, and a pretty creature at that.”

“Let me see her,” Waits begged.

“I think she will be a pretty one too,” Titus observed.

Stopping the work of her hands, the midwife said, “Even if she does look more like her father.”

“Oh, she does!” Waits gushed, clapping her hands together. She then reached out with both arms, imploring. “Here, I want to hold her too, husband.”

“Yes, see if she is ready to suckle,” he suggested as he positioned his infant daughter in the cradle of her mother’s arms and rolled her cheek against a swollen breast. The babe blinked its eyes in the flickering firelight and latched onto the nipple Waits rubbed against the girl’s lower lip.

“I-I wish my mother were here to see this granddaughter,” Waits sobbed, her shoulders trembling as she brushed a dark lock of her newborn’s damp hair back from the brow. She looked up at her oldest daughter. “How proud my mother was of you, Magpie.”

She was crying too when she told her mother, “I think she would be very proud of this new granddaughter.”

Waits looked at her husband a moment, then again at Magpie. “Tell me, daughter—you watched your sister come into this world. Are you ready to be a mother yourself?”

She shook her head emphatically. “No. Not yet, anyway. Someday. But not soon. I don’t have a husband yet. Not even a suitor to court me.”

“And that won’t be for a long time to come,” Scratch admonished, patting the robe beside him so his daughter would come sit with them.

“Here,” Bear Below said, holding up a six-inch section of the whitish umbilical cord to the new father. “You will want this for your daughter’s amulet.”

“Put it in this empty cup,” he suggested.

“You will help me make your sister’s lizard,” Waits declared to Magpie. “It will be good training for you—when your time comes to start having children of your own.”

“I am not ready to be married yet, I already told you that,” Magpie protested, then softened her tone, saying, “but I will do all I can to help you with my baby sister.”

“I am relieved to hear you say you are not ready to marry, Magpie,” he told his daughter. “Because your father isn’t at all ready to give you away to a young suitor!”

Three winters had come and gone. That new daughter born in the deep of an awful winter night was walking and getting her nose into everything, if not her busy little hands. And what a talker she was, almost from the start. Noisy as a little bird.

In fact, Waits had named this little girl Crane, after her own mother who had taken sick not long after Bass brought his family back to Absaroka late that autumn of ’47. Whatever it was that sucked away at Crane’s strength and made her weaker by the day had been merciful in taking the old woman quickly. In that year they had been south to Taos and away to Bridger’s post, this woman had wasted away to little more than skin and bones, so light when Titus picked up her body and carried her to their lodge there beside the Yellowstone as the first snowfall whipped around their camp opposite the mouth of the Bighorn River. She almost felt dried up, desiccated, as if she had been lying out in that hot, endless desert the Ammuchabas^* called their home.

The family cared for the old woman at that camp, and at two more campsites in the weeks that followed, until Crane finally gave up breathing one morning, no more tears seeping from the edges of her tired eyes. While she had been ailing, slowly dying, Titus hadn’t thought he would end up crying when she was gone … but there he was, tying the pieces of broken, discarded lodgepoles across tree branches for her scaffold, the hot tears spilling down his cold cheeks and disappearing into his whitening beard. After Waits and Magpie had cleaned the old woman’s body and dressed it in her finest, they sewed the body up in a brand-new blue blanket—her mother’s favorite color—a blanket brought north from Fort Bridger as a gift to the old one. Now it would weather in the rains and snows, in the ceaseless winds that haunted this high, hard land. The bright blue blanket slowly rotting like the body sewn inside it, returning to the winds that moaned through the bones that would bleach beneath the sun, winter and summer, and winter again in that endless circle that was life, and death, and life anew.

On the village moved, under the new chief—Pretty On Top—Titus’s old friend.^* Over the years the once-impetuous horse thief who had been but a brash and daring youngster when Titus met him twenty winters ago had become a warrior of great note, offering wise counsel, bravely holding off his people’s enemies, kind and thoughtful in the tradition of the great Arapooesh. Often were the times when Bass had hoped a young leader much like Pretty On Top would court his daughter when her time came. But in the past few weeks those hopes had been hung out to dry. During this warming time of the year, when thunderstorms rumbled out of the west and Magpie celebrated her eighteenth spring, the first suitor to come scratching at the door-pole was Don’t Mix.

“Stay away from my lodge,” Scratch grumbled at the handsome suitor. “Don’t come around me or my daughter and there won’t be trouble between us.”

The brash young warrior took a step back and spread out his arms indignantly. “There doesn’t have to be any trouble for us, Uncle,” he said, using that familiar term of respect for an older man. Don’t Mix glanced left, and he looked right. “I don’t see any other young man come to call on your daughter. I think I am the only one who will marry her.”

“Go away,” Titus snapped. He did not like the man’s cockiness, wondering too if he had ever come off sounding so sure of himself when he was a youngster full of rutting juice. “Even if you are the last one she could marry in all of Absaroka, I would still not accept your presents!”

“One day soon I will bring you a lot of presents, Uncle.” The young man again used that term of familial closeness that served only to grate down Scratch’s backbone. “But for now—I must first make Magpie fall in love with me. So I will return tonight with my flute and play love songs for her.”

“I’m warning you—don’t come back,” Bass hissed menacingly, his eyes narrowed at the warrior who started to turn away with a wide grin on his handsome face. “You will make a lot of trouble for yourself if you bother my family.”

“Tell your daughter I will play my music for only her,” Don’t Mix promised, as if he hadn’t paid any attention to the white man’s warning, “tonight, when the moon rises off the hills.”

“No one will be listening!” he bellowed at the young man’s back, angrier still as the warrior walked away.

“Don’t treat him so badly,” his wife said behind him.

Surprised, Titus turned there in front of the lodge and found Waits-by-the-Water stepping from the open doorway. Right behind her came Magpie.

“Why shouldn’t I treat him that way if I don’t like him, don’t want him around Magpie?”

Glancing quickly at her daughter, Waits said, “We don’t have to like our daughter’s suitor, Ti-tuzz.”

“W-we don’t?” he asked, bewildered by his wife’s assertion as his youngest daughter followed them into the sunlight. “Wait, I get it. I suppose this is again one of those matters of the heart that a man is simply too stupid to figure out.”

His wife took one of his old, bony hands in both of hers and said, “No, we don’t have to like our daughter’s suitor. Only she has to.”

It slowly dawned on him, the way the sun came up at the edge of the earth. He looked from his wife’s face to Magpie’s. “Is this true, daughter?”

Magpie bent to pick up her younger sister and positioned the child across her left hip. “I think he is handsome, Popo.”

“You’ve told your mother this, and you did not tell me?”

Magpie dropped her eyes. “We’ve talked about him, the two of us, yes.”

“Your daughter told me of her feelings, Ti-tuzz,” Waits explained to her angry husband. “Don’t Mix is a very handsome young man. Any girl would be proud if he came to court her with his flute songs under the stars.”

“Even though I never played a flute for you—”

“You didn’t have to, husband,” she declared. “I already knew my heart belonged to you. Your flute songs didn’t have to capture it from me.”

After a moment of fuming that he was the last to be let in on this secret, he asked, “Are you trying to talk me into accepting this Don’t Mix with your sweet words, woman?”

“No, think for yourself, husband. Don’t Mix is a good warrior—since we met him those winters ago, you have seen how many successful raids he has led. Not only his good friends like Stiff Arm and Three Irons and Turns Back, but many others are always ready to go on Don’t Mix’s raids into the land of the Blackfoot or the Lakota.”

He did his best to calm the squirm of apprehension wriggling inside him, feeling as if these two women had already made up their minds and now they were going to twist him around to their way of thinking about this young suitor.

“So Don’t Mix is a handsome man—”

“Very handsome, Popo,” Magpie interrupted with an enthusiasm that made her eyes sparkle. “The most handsome man in the camp!”

Titus continued, “And he is a good war leader too.”

“Yes,” Waits replied. “As a man, that is something you can easily agree on. You want a strong war leader for your daughter’s husband.”

“Wait!” he growled, holding up his hand as he whirled on Magpie. “Your mother is telling me you not only are ready to have suitors call on our lodge, ready to let them play their flute songs for you and talk to you beneath the blanket … but you are ready to marry?”

Her head nodded tentatively. “Are you angry because I want to marry?”

That made him stop and consider a moment. “I … I don’t know, Magpie. Perhaps I am not ready to think of my little girl moving away from her mother and father, marrying a man and leaving us to start her own family.”

“But I am not moving away,” Magpie protested. “I will always be close. We will live in the same village.”

“W-we?” he stammered. “Already you and Don’t Mix are a we?”

Waits quickly hoisted little Crane from Magpie’s arms and set the child on her own hip, laying an arm over Magpie’s shoulders as she said, “Your oldest daughter has had her eye on that handsome young warrior ever since that first day we came back from the Blanket Chief’s post on Black’s Fork, when Don’t Mix proclaimed just how beautiful he thought Magpie was.”

Titus looked at his daughter closely. “You have made up your mind on him?”

“Yes.” Then she tried out her winning smile on him.

“There is nothing I can say to convince you to leave your mind open and entertain other suitors until you can decide among them?”

Waits answered quickly, “This is not a matter of her mind, Ti-tuzz. This is a matter for her heart.”

“I want Don’t Mix to play his flute songs for me,” Magpie said, holding up her folded hands before her as if pleading with her father. “I want all the other girls in camp to see him courting me—all those other girls who swoon when they watch him walk past them, when they talk about him among themselves at the creekbank. I want them to be so jealous of me.”

He wagged his head slowly now, eventually admitting, “I have never been afraid of taking on two enemies at one time in battle. Most often, they get in one another’s way. But against the two of you … I am beaten even before I can start!”

“You will let Don’t Mix come to our lodge and play his love songs for our daughter?” asked Waits-by-the-Water.

Titus nodded once, very grudgingly.

Magpie lunged against him, wrapping her arms around him tightly. “Oh, Popo! You will never be sorry for letting me have who I want for a husband.”

Laying his cheek down on the top of her head, he breathed in the sweet smell of her hair and remembered how Waits-by-the-Water had scented her own braids with crushed sage and dried wildflowers in the days of her youth. Then he reluctantly said, “I never want to regret letting Don’t Mix court you, Magpie. But even more important—I don’t ever want you to be sorry for that either.”

The camp was on the move early that summer of ’51, travois swaying under the weight of extra winter hides the men were hauling to the white trader’s post standing west of the mouth of the Rose Hip River^* on the Elk River. After bartering for some supplies, Pretty On Top’s headmen had decided the village would move southwest toward the low mountains, where they could stay in those cool elevations through the hottest days of the summer, capturing wild horses for breeding and even making a visit to the small cave where monumental slabs of ice kept a water seep cold all summer long. Twice each year the band made this particular pilgrimage to Fort Alexander: once in the early summer, and again late in the fall—trading those furs fleshed, grained, and softened by the women, bartering for days at a time for all that the Apsaluuke people needed as they moved through the seasons, in the footsteps of the same circle they had followed since ancient times on the Missouri River far to the east.

Every evening last spring, when the skies cleared off and the sun had set behind the fiery clouds, Don’t Mix had shown up to play his love songs for Magpie. That first night he had stood right in front of the door, blowing the sweet notes from his flute. But Scratch would not let his daughter go outside the first time he showed up, nor the next two. Not until the fourth night. And then, only with her mother standing nearby, watching the two as Don’t Mix finished his love songs, then stepped close to Magpie to talk in tones so low even Waits-by-the-Water could not hear what the two young lovers were saying to one another. It wasn’t too many more days, she had explained to her husband, before the two young people stood with their foreheads touching, holding one another’s hands, gazing into each other’s eyes as they whispered their sweet entreaties beneath the spring starlight.

Sometimes, Titus found an excuse to slip outside the lodge after dinner as the night sky grew dark, carrying his clay pipe and tobacco pouch with him, finding a patch of nearby shadow beneath an overhanging tree or sometimes nestled back against a neighbor’s lodge—where he could watch and listen as this young man courted his daughter. It still rankled him that both women had convinced him that Don’t Mix was a superb catch for Magpie … because something still troubled him inside about the union. He did not know why he suffered those misgivings, but he believed that if he watched from hiding, he might learn enough either to refuse the young man as a suitor to Magpie or to grudgingly accept the young warrior.

“Can Flea come with me, down to the horses?”

Scratch looked up in surprise at Turns Back. The young man hadn’t made a sound as he came out of the trees behind the spot where the white man sat at the edge of the clearing—a father watching those two young lovers standing near the lodge, both of them wrapped in a single blanket, their foreheads touching as they whispered in low tones.

“Yes,” he said.

Scratch patted the ground beside him. The youngster settled close before his own eyes went to staring directly at the couple. For a long time Titus was aware that Turns Back kept his attention trained on his good friend and Magpie without saying a word to explain why he had come to ask about Flea.

Clearing his throat, Bass said, “Many nights you come to spend time with Rea.”

“Yes,” Turns Back agreed, his eyes landing briefly on the white man before he concentrated again on the couple some distance away, young lovers totally unaware they were watched by a friend and a father. “Flea may be much younger than me, but he is nonetheless a good companion.”

“You like spending time with my son?”

“Yes, he has taught me a lot about horses in the time we have been together.”

He reflected on that, watching how the young man kept looking at the couple. Then Titus asked, “You come no other time to see Flea. Only in the evening.”

“After supper, yes.”

“Now that I think about it, you come to see Flea whenever your friend Don’t Mix is here courting Flea’s sister.”

His eyes slowly came to the white man’s face. “Is that true? I did not realize I came to see my friend when Magpie was talking with Don’t Mix.”

Again he did not immediately speak, but instead watched as the young man’s gaze went back to the couple. Eventually Bass dared to flush out the inner ways of this youngster’s heart, asking, “Are you ever jealous of your friend Don’t Mix?”

“Jealous? Why?”

“Because he has won the heart of Magpie.”

To that point Turns Back had been wearing a mask stoically devoid of emotion. But now his face showed a visible hint of regret. “Has h-he won Magpie’s heart? Is this true?”

“I think so,” Bass said with his own regret. “After all, no other has come to court her.”

“Don’t Mix, he is a handsome man.”

“Is he?” Titus asked. “That’s what the girls think, but is he handsome to his friends as well?”

“Yes, I can see why any girl, and especially someone as pretty as Magpie, would give her heart to such a handsome warrior,” Turns Back explained. “For years now I have seen how the girls look at Don’t Mix.”

“And you’ve wished the girls looked at you the same way?”

“Yes … I mean, I used to wish that,” the youngster said. “But, after some time, I realized that they never would, especially Magpie, because I am not a handsome man the way Don’t Mix is so … so—”

“Pretty?”

Turns Back looked at him. “Yes, he is so handsome he is pretty. I can see why Magpie gave him her heart.”

“But does he have a good heart to give her in return?”

“Yes. You will be his father-in-law. Don’t worry about your daughter. Don’t Mix will take good care of her, and treat her well.”

“But is he the best man for her?” Titus prodded. “Isn’t there another who would treat her far better, love her far more deeply than Don’t Mix ever could?”

“How could that be?” he asked, looking at the white man.

“Because a big part of Don’t Mix’s heart is in love with himself,” Titus explained. “Couldn’t there be someone else who has a very strong heart for my daughter, someone who has never spoken up to her about his feelings … some young man who will love her better than any man ever could … because his love is truly hers alone, and not mixed up with his love for himself?”

“I-I don’t know what you are getting at.”

Titus reached out and laid his old hand on the youngster’s bare knee, saying, “I have always thought that the most important reason why Don’t Mix began courting my daughter is that she is pretty enough for such a handsome warrior to have as his wife. She will look good with him. Everyone will say that they are a handsome couple. He did not ever think that Magpie’s beauty could lie beneath her skin as well. He was never interested in what lay inside my daughter.”

“Perhaps he has not thought to look inside to see how beautiful she is—”

“Tell me what you think about my daughter, Turns Back.” He nudged the warrior, squeezing the youth’s knee paternally. “Better yet, tell me why you never came to court her yourself.”

He turned, stared at the old trapper, and swallowed hard. “I don’t know what you want me to say—”

“Say what is in your heart. What you feel about Magpie.”

The young man looked again at the couple, staring a long time before he finally spoke. “I think she is the finest woman any man could marry.”

“Because she is beautiful?”

Turns Back shook his head. “No. Because she is gentle. I have seen her with Jackrabbit, and little Crane. She will make a fine mother to her children.”

“What else do you think about her?”

“I think Don’t Mix is the luckiest man alive.”

That made his heart feel so heavy and sad. Titus felt the hot sting of tears there in the dark as a tall, thin, and weedy youngster emerged from his parents’ lodge and noticed the couple. Flea shook his head in adolescent disgust, then turned and hollered into the darkness.

“Popo!”

“Over here, son!”

Flea started toward them. Turns Back clambered to his feet, dusting off his breechclout. Titus got up much slower than the young man. He grabbed the warrior’s wrist.

“Don’t you think Magpie deserves to hear what you think of her?”

“I-I never could—”

“My daughter deserves to know,” he whispered insistently.

“Don’t Mix is my friend. I don’t want to embarrass him or Magpie.”

“Maybe Flea deserves a good brother-in-law too,” Titus, reflected.

“I like Flea,” he said as the fourteen-year-old youth stepped up to them in the shadows.

“I hope you like me,” Flea said, with a fraternal grin. “I’ve taught you almost everything you’ll ever know about horses.”

Turns Back laughed at that, in an easy way that made Titus feel all the more affection for this shy and selfless warrior.

“So,” Turns Back said as he laid a hand on Flea’s shoulder, “I know as much as you about horses, my friend!”

Flea snorted with that same easy laughter that had always had a special place in his father’s ear. He said to his older friend, “That’s where you are wrong, Turns Back. I’ve taught you everything you’ll ever know about horses, right?”

“Right.”

“But,” said Flea, “I haven’t taught you everything I know about horses!”

All three of them laughed together as Turns Back pounded the young man on the back. Already Flea stood an inch taller than his father, almost as tall as Turns Back. Then the young warrior sighed and turned, gazing again at the couple.

“I will speak to her for you,” Scratch said quietly. “If you won’t speak for yourself.”

“No, no. I could not have you do that,” Turns Back protested. “There’s no reason to cause trouble for the two of them.”

Flea studied the two older men suspiciously and asked, “Are you talking about Magpie? Are you?”

“Yes,” Titus answered, laying a hand on his son’s shoulder. “I think the wrong man is courting your sister, Flea.”

The youngster whirled on the warrior, saying with exasperation, “All this time I thought you were my friend! Why couldn’t you be honest with me and tell me you were only acting like you were my friend because you wanted to be around my sister—”

“I do want to be your friend.” And he put out a hand to grip the young man’s arm.

Flea shrugged it off, taking a step back, saying angrily, “How can I believe you anymore?”

“He’s telling you the truth, Flea,” Titus soothed. “Turns Back has never said anything to Magpie because he did not want to wreck his friendship with Don’t Mix.”

“But he doesn’t mind wrecking his friendship with me!”

“I don’t want that to happen, Flea,” Turns Back pleaded.

“This is an honorable man,” Scratch told his son. “If he could never bring himself to confess his feelings for Magpie, how was that being dishonest with you?”

Flea stood there, staring at the ground for a long time. “I don’t know—”

“Listen, Flea,” Turns Back said. “To prove to you just how much I want to be your friend, I want you to know that I will never tell your sister what I feel for her.”

“Y-you’d do that for me?” Flea asked.

“Yes, because I want to stay your friend. I would rather know that you trusted me than to have your sister fall in love with me. I could never marry your sister knowing that you thought I had betrayed you.”

“Do you see how honorable a man he is?”

Turning to glance at his father a moment, Flea looked at Turns Back and asked, “You … really do feel this strong in your heart for my sister?”

“Yes,” he admitted.

“But—you never told her?”

“No.”

Flea looked at his father and said with a grin, “I think Magpie is going to marry the wrong man.”

Titus himself smiled, his heart swelling with pride and happiness. “I am glad you see things the same as I do, son.”

Turning back to the warrior, Flea said, “If you do not want to tell her yourself, I will tell my sister how you feel about her. Tonight, after Don’t Mix has gone—”

“N-n-no, Flea,” he pleaded. “I cannot make things hard on Magpie, or for my friend Don’t Mix.”

“But,” Titus said, “didn’t you tell me Magpie deserves the very best husband? The man who can love her the way she deserves to be loved?”

The young warrior eventually nodded with great reluctance.

“So,” Scratch asked him, “which of us will it be who tells Magpie that she is making a mistake to marry Don’t Mix? Will it be me, her father? Or Flea, her brother … or—”

“It will be me,” Turns Back interrupted, drawing back his shoulders there in the dark. “It is my heart the words must come from.”

^* The mountain man’s word for the Mojave Indians.

^* Crack in the Sky

^* Rosebud Creek.