Wind Walker

THIRTY-TWO

“Enemies!”

Titus Bass did not need to be told.

He had heard those faint, out-of-the-ordinary sounds drifting to him through the cold of that winter’s dawn. Then the first distant cry of alarm. Followed by the muffled hammer of hooves reaching that ear he had lying against the ground in Magpie and Turns Back’s lodge. Had to be a lot of them from the thunder of their coming. That, or the thieves were running off with every horse Pretty On Top’s band owned.

Across the lodge, Flea was hurrying on with his winter clothing, tying one blanket legging to his belt, and then the other. Turns Back hugged Magpie, then touched the cheek of the infant between them, before he threw back the robes and began to dress in the cold stillness of that breathless lodge.

Yanking on the heavy, furred buffalo moccasins over his others, Scratch quickly dragged on the capote, buckled a wide belt around his waist, then pulled the coyote fur hat over his ears. Into his belt with the two knives went his only pair of pistols. Then he turned to the side of the lodge over the bed where he and Waits had slept for the first time last night. Two leather thongs were knotted in loose loops from the narrow rope that held the liner to the lodgepoles. He freed his old flintlock from the loops, bent to scoop up his shooting pouch, then touched her face with his bare fingertips before stuffing his hands in his blanket mittens—

The first gunshot roared from somewhere on the far side of camp.

He bent to kiss her mouth, recognizing the unspoken fear in her eyes.

As Slays in the Night shoved aside the frozen door flap and hurled himself outside, Scratch rolled up onto one knee and started for the door.

“I am right behind you, Popo!” Flea cried as he lunged onto his feet and followed his father into the gray before dawn’s arrival.

All around them in that instant, men were bursting from their lodges to join those few who were already scuffling across the snow, gathering at the middle of the lodge crescent. Loud voices were raised: a few of the clan chiefs shouting orders to their men, others demanding answers for the unanswerable, fragments of songs and sacred chants just beginning as a few took up the reins to their favored war ponies staked securely at a lodge door … and through it all came the high-pitched wailing of the women and the screams of children from the far side of camp.

In that direction, gunfire became steady, hot. Hoofbeats, male voices louder still, and coming their way.

“The enemy has entered the camp!” Pretty On Top called out from behind the lodges.

Suddenly the young chief appeared in view through the frozen, misty air, gauzy and stinging to the skin with sharp and invisible ice crystals. The old friend caught Bass’s eye, waved him on.

Grabbing the white man’s elbow, Slays in the Night said, “That one, he is a brave man. He wants us to go with him into the fight.”

“These are the men who took your wife, your horses,” Scratch explained hurriedly with a rasp. “They have been brought here to your hand, my friend.”

“Yi-eeee!” Slays called out in a shrill voice as he bolted into a run beside the white man.

“Nothing lives long but the rocks and sky!” Titus reminded him as they lumbered across the snow behind others on their way to stem this challenge to their camp. “If this is our day to look at last upon the face of the First Maker … then let it be known that we died protecting everything dear to us!”

By the time they had covered not more than thirty yards, Bass and Slays in the Night rushed up to a line of warriors, most of whom were kneeling against some lodges, firing their weapons against a crescent of unseen, shadowy gunmen. All a man could tell of his enemy was the flicker of some movement, the orange and yellow muzzle flashes of their firearms. Balls whined overhead, slammed through the stiffened, frozen lodge hides, splintered poles. Inside a few of the lodges, tiny voices cried out in terror.

“Some of our people are trapped!” one of the Crow bellowed.

“Cut them out!” Titus roared as he started forward off his cold, stiff knees. “Cut them out of their traps!”

Flat Mouth was there ahead of him, just as a ball whined past his cheek. Wrenching his long and well-worn skinning knife from its scabbard, Titus plunged it into the back of the rock-hard, frost-stiffened buffalo hide of the lodge and attempted to drag the blade in a downward motion. The knife would not budge. Quickly propping his rifle against the lodge, he gripped the knife in both hands and put his weight behind it, managing to slice a five-foot-long laceration in the back of the lodge cover. Even before he could get his knife yanked away from the bottom of the opening, the first child appeared, all legs and arms, terror-filled eyes and screeching throat. Six of them squirted through the opening before he realized Slays was calling to him in the noisy tumult.

Whirling on his heel as a warrior raked a slice open in a neighboring lodge, Scratch found Slays in the Night with Turns Back and Flea—all three of them pointing behind them … back to the side of camp where their lodge stood.

“The enemy!” Turns Back cried in frustration, shaking his smoothbore.

Flea’s breath streamed out of his mouth like a white streamer, “Father! The enemy has made us fools! They have circled around the camp and are attacking our rear!”

“Come, you fighters!” Slays shouted, standing in the open and making a grand target of himself. “Come, my Crow friends! Kill them all!”

A long, long time their peoples had themselves been enemies—but in this dim light, on this ground, Turns Back and Slays in the Night stood fighting a common foe, side by side.

“Go!” Bass shouted at the trio and started toward them across the trampled snow. “Go to the lodge! I am coming!”

The Blackfoot had arranged a fine diversion for their attack on the Crow village: staging their feint on the north side of camp where part of the herd was grazing in a windswept meadow, while most of their attackers plunged in among the lodges on the south part of the village—where Magpie and Waits waited with the children.

When they were no more than ten long strides from the small, smoke-blackened lodge, horsemen swirled out of the mist ahead of them. Evil faces, eyes glaring with hatred. Faces smeared with dabs and streaks of color. Feathers fluttering from fur caps and the hoods to their blanket coats. Bass heard the thung-thung-thung of bows as he raced on, his cold, aching knees protesting. First two, then more than a dozen riderless horses suddenly careened into view, forcing the four men to leap aside in both directions. Right behind the horses came the first of the Blackfoot raiders—some of them leaning off to swing a stone club or taking quick aim with their short, elkhorn bows, others attempting to aim and pull off a shot with their firearms—

That’s when Titus recognized their cries.

His eyes went directly to the lodge, finding that opening like a black oval in the frost-coated buffalo hides where Waits and Magpie had their faces, watching the battle, waiting for a chance to leap into the open.

“Don’t!” Bass cried as he ducked out of the way of a warrior’s wild swinging of a war club.

The round, stream-washed rock grazed the top of his right shoulder, pitching the white man onto his side in the snow, knocking over a warrior’s medicine tripod erected in front of the man’s lodge. As he rolled onto his hip, he saw Waits already stepping out of the lodge door with Crane positioned under her arm. Magpie was right behind, clutching her babe in her arms.

“Don’t come out!” he screamed at them, his voice high and shrill. “Don’t—”

Waits was already running across the icy rime, hand in hand with little Crane. Her pockmarked face was gray with terror as her moccasins repeatedly slipped on the trampled ground. But still she heaved and stumbled toward her husband. Slowly, slowly lumbering into the open.

“Go back!” he cried, standing to wave at her with that arm. How the shoulder hurt! “Please! Go back inside!”

Behind Waits and Magpie more horsemen appeared out of the frozen mist. Grayish-black forms suddenly squirting between the lodges, weapons leveled, mouths O’ed up in some war cry as their eyes narrowed on a selected target.

Once more he hollered, “Get back inside—”

—as the muzzle of a short smoothbore spit a dirty yellow flame just behind Waits-by-the-Water.

“No-o-o-o-o-o!” he shrieked at the instant Magpie tripped and spilled to the side, almost under a horse’s slashing hooves.

But it was not his daughter, or the grandson he had held for the first time last night, that was the enemy’s target.

Instead, the ball’s impact slammed his wife’s body forward, her back arching reflexively as her fingers flew free of Crane’s tiny hand and the little girl stumbled, tangled up in her mother’s flailing legs as Waits-by-the-Water desperately attempted to maintain her footing.

But there was no ground beneath her moccasins. She was already in the air, sailing awkwardly until she spilled onto the dirty, hoof-hammered snow. The side of her head skidded across the trampled crust as he brought up the rifle at his hip instinctively. There had to be more than ten of them. No matter. He wanted only the one in the red capote, the one who jumped his horse over the woman’s body and bore down on the white man with a frightening cry.

Jerking back on the trigger, Bass felt the weapon jolt in his hands, watched the ball strike the warrior in the side, twisting him slightly on the bare back of his war pony. Clutching his wound and crumpling over on the animal’s withers to keep from falling, the Blackfoot managed to stay atop his horse as he and the rest thundered on past, shrieking their war cries and shouting in triumph. His ball had struck the warrior, but not near good enough to unhorse the man.

Then Titus was spinning round, not intent on reloading—no matter the danger now.

He skidded to his knees beside his wife’s body as Magpie scrambled onto her knees and crawled over with her baby in one arm.

“Mother?”

Scooping Waits into his lap, Titus stared down at her scarred face, wiping some of the crusty snow from her cheek and mussed, unbound hair. Her eyes fluttered half open, found his face, and then widened as she held her gaze on him.

“Ti-tuzz—”

“Sh-sh,” he whispered as the roar of battle ground around them, slowly rumbling into the rest of the village. “L-look at me. Yes, keep looking at me.” He knew that if she did not, her spirit might well fly away—

“I don’t feel my legs,” she groaned. A ribbon of bright blood leaked from the corner of her mouth.

Tears already burning his cold cheeks, Titus crushed her against him and rocked slightly back and forth—pressing one hand harder and harder against that warm, wet gush of blood from the gaping hole in the middle of her chest. Harder and harder still he pushed against the blood and frothy bubbles, moaning himself … not words, just wild and feral sounds as he blinked and blinked to try clearing his eye of tears. His spilled on her cheeks, smeared with the ooze of blood on her chin as more and more gushed from her mouth.

“Don’t go!” he commanded her, feeling her rigid, quaking body begin to loosen.

“Ti-tuzz …,” she whispered with difficulty, heaving with a shudder, her eyes glazing as she continued to stare into his. “Always with you, Ti-tuzz.”

“You can’t go!” he yelled at her as the gunfire withered, fading to the far side of the village. “No-o-o-o!”

“See me soon … on the mountaintop,” she whispered with another gush of blood, her eyes fluttering. “In your dreams … see me real—always see me … in your dreams … real for all time to come—”

He knew it when her body went limp and her head slowly sank against his arm, a last gush of blood spewing from her mouth onto his wrist. Bass pressed harder and harder on the wound, but the more he tried to plug up that hole, the more limp she became. Finally he stopped pushing so hard and slowly brought her against him again, folding her limp, lifeless body into his as he crumpled over her with a wracking sob that shook him to his core. His loose, gray hair spilled across her face and neck. Never had he felt such a cold hollowness like this—

“Mother!”

He heard Magpie’s cry.

Suddenly his head jerked up and his eyes narrowed on his daughter’s face. “Get Crane and your baby into a lodge!”

“Mother? Is she—”

“Hide them in a lodge with you, Magpie!”

Her eyes widening, she was once more his daughter, his little girl again. Magpie’s eyes registered the same mixture of grief and terror as was in little Crane’s as she scrambled to her feet. Crane instinctively lunged toward her mother’s body, clawing at Waits’s limp arm.

“Take her now, Magpie!”

As he pulled the little girl’s hands off her mother’s arm Crane began shrieking.

“Go with Magpie!” he ordered, his words harsh, mechanical. “You must get out of danger. I will bring your mother with me. Now, go with your sister!”

Reluctantly Crane let him pull her hand free from her mother’s blood-soaked sleeve as Magpie dragged her younger sister away toward the closest lodge—

Five riderless horses suddenly hammered through the lodge circle, lunging this way and that to avoid the small child and woman clutching her baby. Magpie shoved her little sister into the neighbor’s lodge, both of them gone from sight through the gaping black oval. He was alone with the body of his dead wife.

And an emptiness he had never before felt swallowed him whole. Nothing he had experienced with the death of friends or that young towheaded grandson. Not even with the unexpected death of their stillborn infant. No, none of the pain he had ever suffered in life had prepared him for the cold, gaping emptiness that had instantly taken a ravenous bite out of his insides and left nothing but a hollow, oozing pit.

It was only slowly that Scratch became aware again of what existed outside his own flesh as the sounds swelled around him once more, the roar of blood that had surged in his ears gradually lessening now as the hole within him yawned all the deeper—threatening to suck him in after it.

Gunfire and the hammer of hoofbeats thundering on the iron-hard winter ground. Men’s angry shouts and the shrill wails of frightened, mourning women. The snarl of camp dogs and the high-pitched, frightened cries and chatter of terrified children.

Of a sudden he felt the warmth touch the back of his shoulder, almost like a fingertip brushing the back of his neck where his tousled gray hair had bared the skin. Slowly he looked up, over his shoulder, saw how the light was just then tinting the frosty branches of the skeletal cottonwood with a pale rose, the color of her blood smeared on his hands. The sun was coming up. A first, pink light had entered the river valley.

“Arrrghghghghgh!” he cried in utter anguish, hot tears spilling from his eyes onto his cold cheeks, spittle spewing from his lips as he cradled her lifeless body against his hollow breast.

“D-don’t take her from me!” he roared as he tore his face away from her hair, from that most familiar scent of her, and stared at the newly awakening sky.

“Damn you!”

How he cursed the spirits, the First Maker, this God who could chip away at him life by life. Leaving him hollow, empty of everything but for a smoldering hate that he immediately knew would drive him on until he had brought these killers to a reckoning. How long that would take, he did not know … but this craving for revenge was like a force of its own and would carry him on for as long as it took.

Bass’s face hardened as he started to sob once more, slowly rocking his wife in his arms, groaning in a feral way like some wild thing caught and with but one way out of a trap. Except—this time he knew it was different. This time he would be required to sacrifice more than a paw imprisoned in the jaws. Gazing down at her face, he sensed those glazed eyes still somehow looked into his … then Titus reached up with his bloody fingertips and gently closed her eyelids.

The coming of the sun set the cold ground mist to steaming.

This first day of the rest of his life without her had begun.

They weren’t hard to track, not these brazen Blackfoot, these remnants of a once-unstoppable force in this northern world. Decimated by pox many, many winters ago, the tribe was now but a shell of its former greatness.

Perhaps that was why they had raided into Shoshone country, then swept back through the land of the Crow—attempting to recapture some semblance of their days of glory.

Titus had to laugh at that. There was no goddamned way any of them could recapture their glory days. Red or white. Nothing was left for the old warriors but to die. Either die quiet in their robes, sucking desperately at a last breath as they lay inside a lodge … or to die as a warrior. Out in the open, among the rocks, out under the sky.

We who are warriors—

Remembering how Whistler, Waits’s father, had died, how Whistler’s son, Strikes In Camp, had died too. Brave men who had unflinchingly stared death in the face at that final moment and not been found wanting. Surely there must be some sort of reward for such men, surely there must be something more for each of us—he found himself brooding again and again over the three days following the attack on the village. Three days of chasing, riding, stopping only to water the horses, then chasing some more until a short halt was called because it was too damned black to dare moving on till dawn.

Slays in the Night and the others slept in fits and starts on the cold ground, wrapped in a blanket or a piece of buffalo robe. But not him. There was nothing more he needed—not sleep, and surely not food. No hungers now … only to get his fingers around the windpipe of the one who had killed her. Titus knew he would remember that face, remember the pattern of the man’s war paint, for as long as this chase took. Something like that was burned into the back of his head like a red-hot iron brand would scour its imprint into a piece of smoldering wood. He saw the face, the paint, the warrior’s clothing every time he merely closed his eyes in weariness. The image was emblazoned behind his eyelids, refusing to release him.

So much the better, Bass thought. It would draw him on until he found the man.

The raiders had at least half a day on their pursuers, time that the camp of Pretty On Top gave over to caring for the wounded and the dead, reaching some count of the stolen horses, calling together the chiefs and headmen of the warrior societies.

“It does not matter how much you argue on who is to go and who is to stay,” Scratch had snapped at these younger men. “It matters little what plans you feel you must make to pursue these enemies. Every word you waste is one more step they take away from Absaroka. Every heartbeat we stand here is one more it will take until we taste the blood of these murderers.”

Quietly, Pretty On Top said, “You are not the only man here to suffer a loss—”

“Then the rest of you who have lost someone you love can do what you want,” he interrupted and shrugged off those war leaders with a wave of his arm. “There is talk … and there is action. I am putting my feet on this last warpath now.”

Titus had turned away and started back toward Magpie’s lodge, his son and his Shoshone friend caught by surprise but quickly catching up to him, one at each elbow. Of a sudden, Turns Back had lunged ahead of him, stopping right in front of the old white man.

“Uncle,” he said to his father-in-law with respect. “I will go with you. With the three of you. She was my wife’s mother. I will go with you—”

“No,” Titus growled as he shoved his flat palm against the young man’s chest. “You stay here with Flea. I don’t want—”

“Stay here?” Flea echoed as he circled around to stand in front of his father, towering over the white man.

Titus looked up at the angry eyes of his son. “You have a brother and a sister to watch over.”

Shaking his head furiously, Flea protested, “My sister, she can care for them while we are gone.”

“Magpie has a family of her own,” Titus scolded his son. “Jackrabbit and Crane, they are your family now, Flea. Your only family.”

“My wife, she can watch her brother and sister,” Turns Back said. “Flea will go with us—”

“No—you two must stay and protect them,” Titus refused with a resolute wag of his head. “Someone brave must stay behind and watch over these lives that mean so much to me.”

Flea drew himself up and looked down at his father. “Turns Back can stay and watch over them all until we come back to bury my mother—”

“No, son—you will do that today. Yourself. The last act of love for your mother,” Titus explained.

“Then I will do it before we go,” Flea said desperately. “So that my mother will be buried before—”

“Don’t you understand, my son?” he snapped at the young man. “My feet have already begun a journey from which there is no return.”

Titus started to step between them, but Flea caught him, held his father tightly by both of the old man’s arms.

“Y-you are not coming back, Father?”

He first looked into the eyes of Turns Back, then at his son’s face, seeing how the eyes started to pool. “When you watch my back disappear through the trees, you will then be the leader of this family—the protector of your brother and sister.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“No … because you are now the one called Holds the Fight,” Titus said, watching the new name register on his son’s face.

“H-holds the Fight?”

“You need a new name, son,” he said, the hard lines of his face softening. “Flea was a good name for a boy … but now you truly are a man. A man who has a family to hunt and provide for, a family he must protect. A father is the one to name his children … when the First Maker finally tells that father what to name the child. Just now I have heard our Creator tell me that you are Holds the Fight—because you will stay behind to protect your family.”

With deep respect Turns Back quietly repeated the name, “Holds the Fight,” then put his arm across his young brother-in-law’s shoulders, struggling to speak as he held back the tears. “Yes, old warrior—the two of us will do as you have asked. Even though it will be painful to watch you ride off after these enemies without us at your side, we will honor She Who Is No Longer Here by obeying your last wishes.”

“And we will honor you, Father,” Holds the Fight added, his chin quivering even as he stood taller than the older men. Quickly he unbuckled the narrow belt he had around his waist, that belt he had worn from the day Jim Bridger had given it to him when he was a gangly youngster that first summer at the post on Black’s Fork. From the long strap he dragged the beaded rawhide sheath and knife. “Take this knife with you, Father. Use it to cut the scalp from the one who killed my mother.”

For a moment he stared down at the weapon held out between them, wanting to refuse his son’s request. Then he took the scabbard into his hand and peered into the young man’s eyes.

“If I return with the scalp, I will bring back your knife,” he said in a whisper, his throat clogging with emotion. “But if I do not return … remember me always to my youngest children. Raise them to honor the memory of their father.”

Holds the Fight lunged against him, encircling his father with his long arms, and they sobbed together for a moment before they tore themselves apart. Titus touched his heart with his empty right hand, then placed those fingertips against his son’s breast.

“Let the memory of me always rise in your heart like the coming of the sun,” he croaked painfully. “It is here—in your heart—that I will always remain.”

Holds the Fight clamped a hand over his father’s fingers, squeezing it against his chest. “I am h-honored to be your son, old warrior.”

With his eyes tearing up again, Titus said, “Come now—I must say good-bye to Magpie, to Jackrabbit and to Crane too, before I go.”

A large Crow war party had caught up to the two old men late that first night, not long after Scratch and the Shoshone had stopped in the dark to rest the six horses they were pushing so hard. The two of them had ridden out with three horses each, the strongest the old trapper owned. When one animal tired, they had changed to another throughout that first afternoon and on into the starry, moonless eventide as they loped, loped, loped north up the serpentine trail, across the wide patches of snow and long straights of hard, flat, flinty ground where the sun had burnt off most traces of the last storm. Theirs was a joyless reunion of determined men.

“These enemies haven’t come into our country like this in many seasons,” one of the older men had explained.

“Why now?” Bass had growled with bitterness.

Pretty On Top said, “Perhaps we will know when we catch up to them.”

“No,” Titus shook his head in resignation. “Chances are we will never know why they came.”

They had pushed on as soon as it was light enough to see six horse lengths ahead. And by the time the sun was rising they spotted the Blackfoot raiders and their stolen horses far off in the distance. No longer was it merely a trail of hoofprints they were following. Now they saw their quarry. He even imagined he could smell these enemies in his nostrils. Maybe it was the strong turpentine scent of the sagebrush crushed under each hoof as the enemy pushed toward the Judith Basin. Strong and wild, the wind in his face, this pursuit infused him with youth once more. Just seeing those warriors and their stolen herd out yonder in the distance felt as if years had been shaved off his old hide. This was meant to be, he thought.

This is the way it was meant to be.

It wasn’t long before he admitted to the pang he was feeling somewhere behind his breastbone—the pain of regret and remembrance, the faces of his children swimming before his eyes as he yanked on the long lead rope to the next horse, a strong, long-legged pinto. At first the wild-eyed pony protested and jerked back its head, but Titus eventually had it loping alongside the tiring claybank he had been riding ever since first light.

“Here, friend,” he called to Slays in the Night. “Hold my rifle for me.”

“A new horse?” asked the Shoshone as he urged his pony close, on the white man’s off side, and took Bass’s old flintlock.

It took a few moments, heartbeats really, to match the strides of the two horses as their hooves thundered across the iron-plated ground, heading up a long, long slope—the last before they reached the winding valley of the Judith. He knew this place well. Lo, the many times he had trapped these grounds, walked the thready paths of these feeder streams, fought grizzly here. If the Blackfoot were thinking to lose their Crow pursuers in this maze of hills and stands of cottonwood, to confuse those who followed in the tapestry of alder and chokecherry, willow and sawgrass, then they hadn’t reckoned on Titus Bass riding up on their tailroots.

He leaned over with his right hand, intertwined his fingers with a handful of the pinto’s mane—then held his breath and rose up to one knee on the claybank. Up and down, up and down he moved with both horses, then suddenly leaped across to that painted pony that ran with its rib cage brushing against the tired, lathered claybank. The pinto grunted at the man’s sudden weight landing on its back. He shifted slightly, his crotch sliding into that natural groove behind the withers. Then he played out the claybank’s long rein, letting the tired horse seek its own pace some yards behind them as Slays in the Night eased over to his side again.

“Here, you will need this soon,” the old Indian said, his eyes glistening with an inner peace.

Bass took his rifle. “Your turn for a new horse.” And he took the Shoshone’s smoothbore, clutching both weapons across the crook of his left arm.

When he looked ahead into the distance at the figures once more, Bass felt his heart leap in anticipation. He thought he saw that red blanket capote at the far right edge of the herd now. In the first dim, gray light of this cold morning the figures had all been black as sow beetles scurrying out from beneath an overturned cowchip. But now, with the coming of the sun, colors came alive. And in the fiery hue the sun gave this high, hard land, Titus finally saw the only one he had been chasing all along. The tails of the Blackfoot’s bright red coat fluttering out behind him in the cold wind that had quartered around to the northwest, smelling strong with the tang of coming snow.

The horizon far ahead looked heavy with it too. All the way north to the Missouri itself, where it was surely snowing already. That mighty, mythical river a man had to cross before he could make these legendary mountains his own. A fabled and fated crossing that few men would survive. Some who had reached this land had already gone back, recrossing the Missouri to what had been before. Still more had gone on until they reached the end of the land and the great salt ocean washed up at their feet. But Titus Bass had stayed here in this high land that few would believe ever existed. Surely the stuff of a schoolboy’s myth, legend, and tall tales. Not possible for a man to have lived out the life Titus Bass claimed he had, those stiff-backed settlement types would say.

It made no difference now. None of their nay-saying made a damn bit of difference. He was here, on the bare, narrow back of a young painted pony, and he had the cold, icy wind in his face … his enemy in view.

With the coming of the sun at their backs, he realized it had turned even colder. So cold it felt like it would never get warm again. The ground beneath him hard as hammered iron. The sky above so blue it hurt his one good eye. The bitter wind made it tear, making colors run and swim.

Turning to his old friend, Titus said, “Soon we will be close enough to see which one of those riders is your Red Paint Rock.”

For a long time, the Shoshone studied the figures, staring into the distance, but not as if he were trying to choose among the distant horsemen. When he finally turned to speak to the white man, his cheeks were wet with frozen tears. “No … our women are dead, Ti-tuzz. Both us have nothing left but the killing now. Our women—they both dead.”

“And soon our enemies will be too,” Titus spoke into the growing strength of the northern wind as the black belly of the horizon darkened, “unless they kill us before we can raise their scalps.”

The Shoshone smiled at that, his eyes brimming, then pounded a fist twice against his left breast and pointed that hand into the distance at the narrowing gap between the Blackfoot and their pursuers.

“Yes, two hearts,” Titus replied with a roar as he pounded his fist twice against his own breast and smiled at this old friend. “Two women. Two old warriors. And two scalps we must take.”

Just as they both shrieked with a feral cry at those icy-blue lowering clouds, the Blackfoot raiders suddenly boiled into action. The enemy horsemen reined this way and that into the captured herd, splitting the Crow ponies in half, then even more pieces, as the raiders divided and divided, and divided again—a few warriors taking a small bunch of the horses and slowly peeling off from the direction they had all been taking together.

“I must follow the Red Coat!” Titus shouted.

The Shoshone nodded. “It is good! You see the one riding beside your red coat?”

“The one wearing the headdress with one buffalo horn?”

Slays grinned, his eyes hard. “That one, I remember from the taking of my woman.”

“They go together,” Scratch cried happily.

“So will we!”

Five of them. That Red Coat. And the Buffalo Horn Headdress. In addition there was an elkskin painted an earth yellow. Then a faded, green-striped blanket. And finally a buffalo robe decorated with wide bands of earth-paint color running its full width. Five would not be so many that he and his old friend could not whittle them down once they caught these Blackfoot. Five had never been too many for a man who put his head down and kept on coming. Nothing else a man could do when he found he had nothing left to lose.

Magpie. His sweet little Magpie all growed up and married, a mother too. And that oldest boy of his. How he had already made his mother proud. One day soon he would cast his eye on a girl and take a bride—perhaps even this coming spring, when the days lengthened and the weather warmed and a young man’s blood pounded hot and strong in his limbs. Holds the Fight would father his own children. And so the blood of one tired old warrior would be reborn again and again and again, and again. If Titus had not made his son stay behind, chances were Holds the Fight would never have known the pleasure a woman could bring a man, never experienced the joy of holding his own newborn child naked in his arms, all arms and legs and screwed-up red face staring into his.

The same mighty blood coursed through young Jackrabbit, already coming of age. And in little Crane too. The one who looked more like her mother than any of the others. They both had this chance, both stood on the cusp of a changing world their father could not begin to fathom, dared not even attempt to imagine. His youngest two now belonged to their brother, and to each other. They were family—even without their mother and father. They were family.

“Children,” Scratch had said as he dropped to one knee on the snow in front of Magpie’s lodge and wrapped the youngest two into his arms, “you will go with your brother soon, and pray at the foot of the tree where he will lay your mother.”

“You will not be there to pray with us, Popo?” Jackrabbit asked.

“No, your brother is a man now. He will watch over you for me, instead of me, from this morning on,” he whispered, then hid his tears in their hair as he crushed both of the youngsters against him and kissed the tops of their heads.

Little Crane squirmed her way loose so she could peer up into her father’s lined and war-tracked face. Her tiny hand came to the long scar that coursed its way down from the outside corner of his left eye. She stroked it with such intense seriousness, and finally asked, “When will you come back to us?”

He smiled through the tears. “One day, I’ll see you both again, Crane. Just like you will see your mother again one day too. When what I have to do is finished … I will see you both again.”

The flesh between her eyes knitted up in confusion. “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to a place where I hope to put your mother’s spirit and mine to rest, little daughter.”

This time a suspicious Jackrabbit inquired, “How far away is that?”

Tousling the boy’s hair as he got to his feet and pulled those young ones against him, waving Hold the Fight and Magpie against him too, wrapping all four in his arms, Bass said, “I hope it is not too long a journey, children. When you go to the tree and pray at the foot of your mother’s body … ask the First Maker to be sure it is not too long a journey for your old father.”

One by one, he kissed them each, on the eyes, on the mouth too, touched their faces one last time, remembering the golden, shining moments of their squirming infancy and how they had brought such exquisite joy to their mother … then before the agony of this separation would delay him any longer, or he would decide against leaving them without both of their parents, Titus Bass suddenly spun and walked away from his four children—

Ahead of him now those five Blackfoot raiders yipped and cried at one another, repeatedly glancing back over their shoulders at the pair of horsemen who followed, closing the gap.

“You are not alone, old warrior!”

Titus turned and looked over his shoulder, surprised to find the face of the one who had called out to him from behind. Bear Who Sleeps urged his heaving pony up to the white man’s side. He smiled at the Crow. “Is your heart strong today?”

The warrior grinned and shook his old smoothbore. “It is a good day to die!”

That made him yip like a young warrior, the cold wind and lowering sky whipping tears from the corners of his eyes. Titus slapped his chest and cried out, “Nothing lives long but the rocks and the sky! All the rest of us must die!”

“A good day for this!” Slays bellowed on his other side. “A good day!”

“Goddamn right!” Titus roared to the heavens rumbling toward them, boiling with a storm right over their heads, blue sky turned black and heavy with winter’s fury, clouds beginning to hurl sharp lances of icy snow. “What a damned grand day it is to die!”