Buffalo Palace

15

Ol’ Scratch, they were calling him now.

“On account of you gettin’ the green wore off,” Billy Hooks told him one morning early that spring of 1827 as they were on their way west, making for the Three Forks country.

As if it was something learned, Bass looked over at Silas Cooper for some sort of confirmation. The big man squatted by the fire, warming his hands, late that morning after they had been out since well before first light, setting traps among the streams that watered the Yellowstone north of what would one day soon come to be known among the mountain men as Colter’s Hell.

“Billy ain’t tellin’ y’ no bald-face, Scratch,” the black-bearded man agreed. There flashed one of those exceedingly rare twinkles of good humor in the marblelike eyes. “That’s for sartin. Y’ see’d yourself through your second winter: now, that makes a man a hivernant, or I don’t know poor bull from fat cow.”

“Ol’ Scratch,” Bud Tuttle repeated it now, grinning as he clearly took some pleasure in that coronation. “It’s purely some for a man’s companions to start callin’ him Ol’ this or Ol’ that. Hell, Titus—these here bastards don’t even call me Ol’ Bud!”

“Plain as your own ugly mug that y’ ain’t earned yourself that name the way Scratch here has,” Cooper sniped. “He’s come to be twice the trapper y’ are.”

Tuttle pursed his lips and nodded. “I cain’t argee with y’ there, Silas. Scratch’s better’n both Billy an’ me—so why you call Billy Ol’ Billy and y’ don’t call me Ol’ Bud?”

Cooper slowly pulled the ramrod out of the long fullstock’s barrel, doubled the small oily patch back over, and drove it back into the muzzle, shoving it all the way down to the breech as he swabbed burned, blackened, sulfurous-stinking powder out the barrel. “True enough Scratch is better’n the two of you at bringing them flat-tails to bait. But the reason I likely ain’t ever gonna call you Ol’ Bud is you ain’t never gonna be half the mountain man Billy is. An’ Scratch here,” Silas said as he dragged the ramrod out of the barrel and pointed it at Bass, “why—he’s already got Billy beat way up on that stick.”

Instead of protesting, Hooks merely took that appraisal in stride. Looking over at Bass, Billy said, “I figger Silas got that right, Scratch. After two winters with us’ns, you already come to be near good as Cooper.”

With a faint grin cracking his black beard, Cooper looked up at Bass and replied, “Near good as me, Scratch.”

“You got you a long head start on me, Silas,” Titus conceded, self-effacing and aware that he must never put himself in a class with their forty-five-year-old leader.

Into the fire Cooper tossed the small round patch of cloth, well-lathered with bear oil and blackened powder from the grooves of his rifle. Landing on a blazing limb, where it spat and sizzled a moment before the edges began to turn black, Silas declared, “And there h’ain’t no use in you figgerin’ y’ll ever catch up to me neither. Makes no matter that you’re a dozen years younger’n this nigger. No matter neither how good y’ figger to get at trappin’ or trackin’ or nothin’, Scratch.”

“I ain’t ever tried to be better’n—”

Cooper interrupted, “Because y’ don’t stand a whore’s chance at Sunday meeting of ever outriding, outfighting, outpokin’, or outkillin’ me.”

With a shrug Bass admitted, “Plain you be a better man’n all of us, Silas.”

“Damn right I am,” Cooper declared as he wiped an oily patch up and down the browned barrel of his rifle. “An’ there h’ain’t nothin’ the three of you can ever do what can change that.”

Bobbing his head, Hooks said, “You’re the booshway of this here outfit, Silas Cooper! Big bull in this here lick!”

Chuckling a moment, Cooper finally said, “But don’t go getting the idee that means none of y’ can let up on trying to outtrap the other fellas, now. This nigger wants to have us more plew to trade than any four men rightly should.”

“Ought’n make that Ashley trader’s eyes shine to see all the packs we’ll have to trade ’im come summer—right, Silas?” Tuttle exclaimed.

Cooper’s face turned grave as he explained, “Lately I been thinkin’ of just where we go come summer.”

“Wh-where we go?” Serious concern crossed Billy’s face as he continued sputtering, “Ain’t w-we headin’ down to Sweet Lake to m-meet them company boys for ronnyvoo?”

With a shrug of a shoulder and scratch at his chin, Silas replied, “Once’t I got it all worked out up here in my noggin’, then I figger it’s time to tell y’ three the way it’s gonna be for summer trampin’.”

“Trader’s likker and all them niggers joinin’ up after a long winter of it,” Tuttle mused. “Ronnyvoo is what I been thinkin’ on more an’ more ever’ day my own self, Silas.”

“G’won now an’ don’t none of y’ worry a lick ’bout it,” Cooper confided with that mouthful of big yellow teeth. “When I figger out just what we’re gonna do—I s’pect my idee’ll damn well make sense to the hull durn lot of y’.”

So it was that the three continued to let the one do their thinking for them. Where to go for the beaver, and when to move on to the next camp. Which bands to winter with and what Injuns to avoid. All the trails and passes, every inch of the routes they had traveled, moseying down one stream and wandering up the next, all across this last year and a half—how quickly Titus had learned that Billy and Bud left nearly everything requiring a decision squarely in Cooper’s lap.

And that’s how they had come to spend this past winter with the tall and haughty Crow, a season known among that tribe as baalee, “When the Ponies Grow Lean.”

From that mountain valley where Titus learned all he ever cared to know about grizzlies last autumn, the white men had continued easing their way on north, down into the fertile lowlands, where many of the streams draining the high country were dammed here and there, the timbered and sheltered places converted into deep ponds where the industrious flat-tails constructed their beaver lodges. There, too, late one autumn day, they had spotted the first Indian they had seen since rendezvous.

It had started off snowing earlier that morning, no more than an inch or two of fine, dry flakes. Nothing at all like the heavy, wet, icy snow that Titus had known back east. By afternoon, as the four of them saddled up once more and set out to check their traplines, the thick charcoal blanket of clouds had even begun to scatter and lift. A few shafts of brilliant light touched the valley here and there with gold, shimmering against the new, pristine snow.

“How far you figger it is till we reach this here Yallerstone country we aimin’ for?” Hooks asked as the horsemen eased up out of the willows and onto the flats again, across the narrow creek from their campsite.

Cooper wagged his head, staring off. “Got no idea how much farther it be. Just that it still lays north some.”

“A handful of days,” Bass offered abruptly with such conviction that he even surprised himself. It took a moment before he noticed the way the other three had turned to regard him in wonder. A bit self-conscious, he added, “No more’n a week.”

“That true, Silas?” Tuttle inquired, eyeing suspiciously.

“How the hell’d I know? I never come through this way!” Cooper snapped; then he glared at Bass. “So tell us just how the hell y’ think y’ know.”

“Don’t,” Bass answered. “Not for certain. Just feels like it ain’t all that far.”

Turning back around in his saddle, Silas grumbled, “I s’pose we’ll just have to see about—”

“L-lookee there, Silas!” Hooks interrupted with a sputter.

The other three looked where Billy was pointing. Off to the north on the brow of a hill sat a half-dozen horsemen, something on the order of a mile away, maybe a little more. They sat there motionless as statues, as if they had always been there on the crest of that rise.

Tuttle whispered hoarsely, “W-where’d they come from?”

“Keep moving,” Cooper said, his voice gone quiet despite the great distance between the two parties.

“We just let ’em know we see ’em, eh?” Bud asked.

“I s’pose that’s the make of it,” Cooper agreed.

Billy dragged the greasy wool of his capote sleeve across his lower face and asked, “What you make ’em to be, Silas?”

“They ain’t Blackfoot,” Titus declared instead.

Flicking the younger man a glare, Cooper answered, “They ain’t Blackfoot—that’s as plain as paint.”

Tuttle asked, “How come you say not?”

“Blackfoot wouldn’t let us see ’em,” Silas replied.

To which Bass added, “Damn right: Blackfoot’d just sit off somewhere and watch us, maybeso wait to lay onto us somewhere up the trail.”

“You figger it that way, Silas?” Hooks said, turning to Cooper for confirmation.

“I figger this young’un here might be right on that, first whack.” Then for a moment Cooper studied the distant figures there against the backdrop of that lifting gray sky: loose-hair and feathers, scalp locks and fringe tussled with the tease of every little gust of breeze that crossed that hilltop. “Yeah—Scratch likely be right, fellas. This here got the feel of Crow country. And I figger them Crow just lookin’ us over to see what we’re all about.”

Bass inquired, “Ever you been to Crow country?”

“Not this far south,” Cooper explained. “We come on down the Yallerstone with Henry’s bunch many a year back. Got as far as the mouth of the Bighorn. But I ain’t never been south from there.”

Billy nodded. “Yessirreebob—this here’s new country to us all!”

“What you s’pose is up now?” Tuttle asked.

They were watching as the half-dozen horsemen all turned away together and slowly disappeared over the backside of the hill.

“I figger we’ll find out soon enough,” Cooper answered, his words doing damned little to allay any apprehensions.

But to play things smart, Silas sent Billy and Tuttle back to camp with orders to bring in the pack animals and sideline them—just in the event those six horsemen decided to romp on through and drive off a few mules and horses for themselves.

For the rest of that afternoon Cooper and Bass never strayed from eyeshot of one another: most often Silas was the one to stay in the saddle, watching and listening, attentive to the middistance, while Titus checked each one of the group’s sets, pulling out a beaver here and there if one of the wary animals had stretched his rodent luck enough. They were back at their camp to rejoin the others well before twilight as the temperature began to slide rapidly and the western sky became a burnished autumn umber—bringing with it cold enough to cause a man’s thoughts to turn to buffalo robes and warming his feet by a fire.

For the next three days, as watchful as they were, not one of them saw a telltale sign of any horsemen. It was almost enough to make a man disbelieve he’d seen anything of horse-mounted warriors that winter afternoon as the sky cleared and the sun broke through.

Then came the fourth morning.

As was usually the case, Bass awoke before the others in the dark, cold stillness of predawn. Dragging the buffalo robe and blankets around him as he shifted closer to the fire ring, he punched life back into the coals, filled the coffeepot with icy water from the trickle still flowing in the nearby creekbed, then nudged the others before he moved off to the mouth of a nearby ravine where he had picketed Hannah and his horse right in camp. Being the first up most every morning just naturally saddled Titus with the responsibility of freeing up the stock from their picket pins, usually put out to graze on the downwind side of camp some distance away, taking the animals to water while the coffee heated.

After returning from the creek with Hannah and his saddle mount, tying them to a span of rope strung between two trees where he had made his bed, Titus headed off toward the copse of old timber where the rest of the stock had been picketed for the night.

He was breathless by the time he sprinted back into camp to find the others just sitting up in their blankets, rubbing grit from eyes and scratching one place or another on their dirty anatomies.

“The horses! They’re gone!”

Cooper rose to one knee as the robe slipped off his shoulders, turning to stare right at the mule and horse. “Pray y’ tell me what the hell those are!”

Huffing to a halt, Bass braced his hands on his knees, heaving for air at the same time he tried to explain. “Not them … I didn’t … put mine down … with your’n.”

“What’re y’ trying to say?”

“Rest of the stock’s gone.”

“Gone?” Cooper repeated. “Y’ mean y’ found they all just pulled up their pins an’ moseyed off last night?”

“Unh-uh,” Titus replied. “They didn’t pull up pins and mosey off—”

Silas leaped off the ground, fists working and angry. “Goddammit! Tell me!”

“They was took!”

Squinting hard as he stood glowering down at the shorter Bass, Silas demanded, “How the hell y’ so sure they was took?”

“I see’d tracks.”

“Horse tracks?”

“No,” Titus answered. “Mokerson tracks. Lots of ’em.”

The three of them had followed Scratch to the nearby grove, where they read what story the hard, brittle grass and flaky soil had to tell them. More than a dozen of them by a reasonable count—at least ten, anyway … all crept into the stand of trees together, spread out, and began silently cutting the picket ropes from the pins driven securely into the hard ground. One by one the horses and mules had been led away in the direction the thieves had come on foot—until they reached a spot about a mile away, where it was plain to see the warriors had tied their own ponies.

Back and forth over the ground the four of them moved, bent at the waist, stopping to kneel from time to time, studying. But not one of them studied the ground as much as Titus Bass. The way the moccasins curved tightly down from the big toe along the tops of the other toes at a sharp angle. Except for the size of each print, and perhaps the depth of each print and the length of stride—those factors accounting for the varying height and weight of the thieves—the moccasins were all made the same: although sewn by different women, they all appeared to be cut from some very similar pattern.

“Lookee here, fellas,” Bass said as he laid his own right foot down beside a clear impression of a thief’s right foot.

As the others came up, Titus slowly lifted his own moccasin.

“What the hell y’ got to show me?” Cooper snapped.

“Look,” Bass repeated, squatting to point at the thief’s print. “See how this’un’s shaped like this, here an’ here.”

“Yeah,” Hooks replied. “So?”

“See here on my print I just made,” Bass instructed. “It don’t look the same, does it?”

“I be go to hell and et for a tater!” Tuttle gushed, kneeling beside Bass and pointing. “It ain’t the same, Silas.”

Wheeling on Bass, Cooper spat, “S’pose y’ go and tell me what good that’s gonna do us, Scratch.”

With a shrug Bass said, “No earthly good a’tall.”

Fuming, Cooper declared, “Then why all the preachin’, y’ weasel-stoned pup?”

“Just showin’ you something I figgered out,” he said as Cooper wheeled away angry. “Figgered out … all on my own.”

Titus stood there watching the backs of the other two join Silas Cooper’s as all three stomped off for camp—on foot. The wind punched right out of his sails, and with no one wanting to share in the joy of his personal discovery, his shoulders began to sag as he followed in their wake.

For the rest of that morning the four of them worked feverishly at hiding from view and prying eyes what beaver they had taken that season, caching the packs of plews and what excess plunder they couldn’t pack off now, stowing all of it here and there within the thickest clumps of willow and alder—as out of sight as they could make it. Then they covered their sign the best they knew how, dragging branches over their footprints so no tracks would point the way to their cache of beaver and camp goods.

With Hannah and that lone saddle horse swaybacked beneath all their blankets and robes, along with their cooking gear, some coffee, flour, beads, and vermilion, in addition to several extra pounds of powder and a few bars of bullet lead, the four finally set out on foot shortly after midday … following the backtrail of the horse thieves.

Most all day Cooper muttered under his breath until they made camp that first evening. As twilight sucked the last warmth out of the sky, Scratch took Hannah’s long picket rope and tied it to the wide leather belt holding his capote around his waist when he curled up in the robes and blankets, his feet toward the fire. Billy Hooks did the same with the saddle horse. They were not about to chance losing these last two animals to whatever thieves roamed that country. That first tug, even a faint tussle on the ropes, would serve as the alarm.

By the time it was slap dark that frigid autumn evening, Silas, Scratch, and Tuttle were asleep. Each in turn would be awakened through the long night to stand his watch: to listen to the distant call of the owls on the wing, the cry of the wolves on the prowl and the yapping of the nearby coyotes; to sit alone and feed the fire while the others snored. Alone in one’s thoughts of women and liquor, remembrances of old faces and young breasts and thighs. To think back as the cold nuzzled more and more firmly around a man, here in the marrow of the Rocky Mountains.

The following morning they awoke to a lowering sky. The wind that had been puffing gently out of the west quickly quartered around, picking up speed as it came out of the north. With no other choice they walked into the brutal teeth of that wind until early afternoon when the clouds on the far horizon began to clot and blacken, hurrying in to blot out the sun. Within an hour icy sleet began to pelt them, coating everything, man and animal and all their provisions alike, with a thin, crusty layer of ice.

By sundown they were exhausted, forced to stumble on foot across a slippery terrain, leading the mule and horse up and down creekbanks and coulees, forced to search for more open ground where the footing wouldn’t be so treacherous—but where they knew they might be easy to spot by the horse thieves. It turned out to be the sort of day that reminded Titus just how quickly the cold could rob a man of his strength, the sort of icy cold that might even come close to stealing his resolve and will to go on.

Nearly at the end of their worn-out rawhide whangs, the four hobbled into a grove of cottonwood near the lee side of some low hills and tied off the weary animals. While two of the trappers kicked around in the snow to gather up deadfall, another brought in water from the nearby stream, and the last of them brushed snow back from the ground where they built their night fire.

“I’ll take first watch,” Scratch volunteered as they chewed on their dried meat and drank their scalding coffee.

“Best by a long chalk,” Tuttle said, “than for a man to get hisself woke up when he’s dead asleep, smack in the middle of the dark an’ the cold.”

Better was it to stay awake, he thought as the night deepened, and stand to first watch. But when he had turned Billy Hooks out and crawled off to his robes and blankets, Titus found he could not sleep. Instead he lay shivering beside the crackle of their small fire for the longest time—unable to escape his fear of just what might become of them out here without the rest of their animals, in the middle of a wilderness where the brownskins came and went as they pleased, taking what they wanted from a white man.

Damn well didn’t seem near fair, it didn’t—when he hadn’t come to stay among these hills, beside this stream, after all. Only to take a few beaver and move on to new country. No more than passing through. So them Injuns had no right to have call on taking what wasn’t theirs. No right at all.

Nothing like Silas Cooper, no it wasn’t. The man took what Scratch grudgingly admitted was his share—but Cooper hadn’t taken it for naught. No, it was his rightful share in exchange for saving Bass’s life, for keeping Bass alive, for teaching Bass day in and day out. By damn, to Titus that was a fair exchange between two men.

But this stealing of a man’s horses and mules. Putting that man afoot as a blue norther bore down on these high plains and uplands. And the worst part of it was that the new snow had eventually blotted out the trail the farther north they walked. Still, the four of them had a good notion the thieves were leading them north, right into the teeth of the coming weather.

That day the trappers had even agreed that they would find the thieves up yonder, in that. Yellowstone country. No matter that they didn’t have a trail to follow. All they would have to do was keep watch from the high ground, a ridgetop or the crest of a hill, straining their eyes against all that bright and snowy landscape—searching for some sign of a pony herd, a cluster of brown lodges nippling against the cold skyline … and if nothing else, maybe they’d spot some ghostly smudge of firesmoke trickling up into the autumn sky.

That’s how they found the Indian camp, far, far off the next afternoon.

From a distant ridge they could make out the lighter brown of the buffalo-hide lodgeskins scalded black at the smoke flaps, each cone raising its gray offering of heat, and food, and shelter from the cold. Ponies grazed beyond the lodges on what grass they pawed free or snow. People came and went on foot among the lodges, down to the thick groves of tall cottonwoods, or to the narrow stream meandering in its crooked, rocky, springtime-wide creekbed.

“Who they look to be?” Tuttle asked anxiously as they huddled there on the ridgetop as the wind came up.

Hooks prodded, “They ain’t Blackfoots, is they?”

“Blackfoot would’ve rubbed us out first—then took the horses,” Bass reminded them, feeling exposed and vulnerable against the skyline. “Maybeso we ought’n get ourselves down off this ridge, Silas.”

Cooper didn’t say a thing for the longest time, studying not so much the village as he looked here and there across the valley for horsemen. Then he watched the way the men acted in camp, for it ought to be plain if they were a hostile bunch or not.

Scratch agreed when Silas explained to them as much.

“Maybeso this bunch showed us they didn’t mean us no harm but for takin’ our animals.” Titus looked this way and that, growing more nervous what with the way they were backlit by the afternoon’s light.

Cooper glared at Bass, saying, “But we come here to get them horses back. Then—maybeso I’ll mean them some harm.”

“Only us again’ all of them?” Tuttle squeaked.

Shaking his head, Silas admitted, “Nawww—it don’t have to be a fight, boys. We just wait till dark—sometime after moonset. Then we’ll slip in and get what’s rightfully ours.”

“J-just like that?” Hooks asked. “We ain’t never … not ever gone an’ stole horses from Injuns, Silas.”

“A first time for ever’thing, Billy.” Having snarled the rest into the silence of their own private thoughts, Cooper gazed off into the valley for a few minutes. “Looks to be a likely place off down yonder where we can lay up and wait till it’s good and dark—”

“God-damn!” Scratch bawled, yanking his longrifle out of the crook of his left arm.

With the sudden appearance of the horsemen, the others were doing the same—but in the span of three heartbeats they realized their four guns were little match for the two dozen or more who burst from the trees on one side, breaking over a nearby hilltop on the other.

“We gonna take what we can of ’em with us afore they cut us down, Silas?” Billy asked in a harsh whisper.

“Just hold your water,” Cooper cautioned, suspicion in his voice. “Don’t unnerstan’t why they coming in so slow—”

“Cooper’s right, Billy,” Scratch confided, the short hairs at the back of his neck bristling. “Just don’t let ’em get in here too close.”

At times like these a man remembered the lessons in life learned the hard way—clear as rinsed crystal. And right at this moment Titus recalled the way the Chickasaws glided up silently on the black-and-silver Mississippi, then rushed Ebenezer Zane’s boatmen out of the night … recalled how the Arapaho laid waiting in their ambush for the Ute hunting party last winter—then sprang like a cat coiled for the attack.

Bass continued, “But it do seem a mite contrary, don’t it, fellas? If’n this bunch wanted our hair here and now—likely they’d come at us on the run.”

As it turned out, the horsemen brought their wide-eyed ponies to a halt at a respectful distance, completely circling the trappers. Turning slowly, Bass looked each one over quickly. A handsome outfit they were, fine of form and every one decked out in their feathers and teeth, hair tied up atop their heads with stuffed birds and scalp locks fluttering from coats, robes, and shields. A few of them talked among themselves quietly, but for the most part, the ponies made the only noise, restless and restive as they snorted in the cold, pawing at the hard ground beneath the thin skiff of new snow.

“By doggee!” Hooks exclaimed only so loud. “Them ponies of their’n don’t like our smell.”

“Come to think of it,” Tuttle agreed, “I don’t think any white person with a good nose would like your smell, Billy.”

“Hush your yaps!” Cooper snarled as one of the horsemen inched out from the others in the circle. He began to make sign with his hands. “By damn, I think we might be able to talk to these here boys after all.”

Without reservation he suddenly handed his rifle back to Tuttle and quickly began to make sign.

The warrior smiled, then replied in kind, his hands fluttering before him as he nodded in the closest thing to friendliness Bass had seen since the hospitable Shoshone at last summer’s rendezvous.

“’Pears to be an agreeable sort,” Bud commented.

“Don’t seem so bad a bunch, after all, do they?” Hooks added.

Cocking his head around to tell them over his shoulder, Cooper said, “This here’s a bunch of Crow.”

“By damn, we run onto the Crow ’stead of Blackfoot!” Tuttle cheered with genuine relief.

Hooks slapped Titus on the back. “Crow got ’em some purty squaws, so the downriver talk says. Mighty purty squaws.” Then he bent his head close, his lips almost touching Bass’s ear. “Maybeso we can talk Cooper into winterin’ up with these here Crow and their womens. Word on river says these bang-tails make the best robe-warmers!”

Bass grumbled, “Maybeso you’d better wait to see what these here bucks have in mind for us afore you up and decide you’re gonna spread some Crow squaw’s legs for the winter here.”

With a snort Billy rocked back on his heels and said, “You grown particular of a sudden, Scratch? Gone and got picky about where you poke your wiping stick?”

“Hush, Billy!” Tuttle warned while Cooper went on talking in sign.

With some word from their leader, half of the warriors slowly turned their ponies and formed up loosely to move off down the slope toward the valley and that village nestled among the cottonwoods along the river.

“All I know is that running onto Injuns means we found us some brownskin sluts,” Billy hissed with a grin on his thick lips. “An’ I ain’t never met me a brownskin slut what didn’t kick her legs wide for Billy-boy here when I showed her a handful of my purty red beads or a little strip of ribbon!”

“Maybeso ol’ Silas got lucky for y’ boys again!” Cooper crowed as he turned and joyously slapped Hooks on the shoulder. “Leave it to me to find a warm lodge, and a warm honey-pot for our stingers, ever’ time!”

As the remainder of the horsemen urged their ponies closer to the white men, Tuttle whispered, “What they figger to do with us, Silas?”

Cooper smiled in that long black beard of his that tossed in the rising wind, slapping both hands down on the tops of Bud’s shoulders. “Ease your hammer down, son. These here Crow bucks just gave us the invite to come on down for dinner with their big chiefs.”

Billy echoed, “Big chiefs?”

Taking his rifle back from Tuttle, Cooper said, “From the sign talk I just got, looks like they knowed we was coming after our horses for the last two days.”

Bud asked, “An’ if we didn’t come after the damned horses?”

Grabbing Turtle’s elbow to urge them all down the snowy slope, Silas said, “Then they’d knowed we had us yaller stripes painted down our backs an’ was no better’n women.”

As the afternoon light deepened the hues of everything from clouds, to cedar, to the surface of the creek itself in that hour before the sunset, the Crow warriors escorted the white men into their noisy village. Not all that different from making their ride into the Ute village last winter, to Scratch’s way of thinking. Except one thing—these Crow sure were a tall people. Men and women both seemed taller than the Shoshone, and the Ute he had come to know in Park Kyack. Too, the more he looked at not just the menfolk, but the children and the Crows’ slant-eyed womankind, the more Titus felt these were as fair-skinned and handsome a people as rumors and campfire palaver had boasted they were.

Cooper turned over the two animals to a pair of young, smiling boys who appeared to take their grown-up responsibilities most seriously as they barked at the children to stay back from a wary Hannah and the restless saddle horse. And with that the trappers were shown into a warm lodge where waited at least ten men as old as Cooper himself.

That first evening of ceremonial smoking and eating boiled meat dragged on and on as speeches were made and exploits recounted by every warrior in attendance before he began his turn at haranguing the rest. And sometime after the first winter moon had fallen in the west, the white men were told that they would have to wait until morning for an answer to what would be done about their stolen horses.

When the next morning finally became afternoon, the trappers were told they would have an answer the following day. But it wasn’t until four days later that Cooper and the others were called before the Crow council, after impatiently cooling their heels where they were allowed to camp in a grove of cottonwood at the edge of the village circle.

“Seems they figger they got the right to ask us to pay for the beaver we’re taking from their criks,” Cooper explained what he had been told in the stillness of that council lodge. “They took our stock to pay for that beaver they say we’re stealing.”

“I don’t figger they’re asking for all that much,” Bass said.

For a moment Silas glowered at Titus, then finally asked, “What y’ think, Billy?”

“You tell me, Silas. Think we ought’n give ’em any of our beaver?”

Cooper looked at Tuttle. “If’n we don’t—these thievin’ bastards said they’d stretch us out over a fire an’ let their womens do their worst to us.”

“That … that ain’t ’sactly what they said, Silas,” Bass corrected.

“Oh?” Cooper demanded, smiling the best he could for the sake of the Crow men, his marblelike eyes nonetheless glaring holes in Bass.

“From what I saw ’em sign to you,” Titus explained, “they give us a choice.”

Pursing his lips in seething anger, Silas crossed his arms and said, “So now y’ figger y’ read sign language good enough to know what the hell these ol’ bucks said to me? S’pose y’ tell us all ’bout it, y’ boneheaded nigger.”

Not only were the eyes of the trappers on him now, but the black-cherry eyes of every one of the Crow elders and counselors were as well, clearly sensing the tension among the white men.

“From what I make of it,” Scratch started tentatively, then swallowed hard, “looks to be we got us one of two ways to go at this. We can give ’em something in trade for the beaver we been taking out’n the streams in their country, or …”

“Or?” Tuttle squeaked.

“Or they throw us right on out the way they found us—maybe lucky to get our mule and horse back.”

Hooks twisted to look at Cooper. “That true what Scratch said? We give ’em something to trade or they turn us out?”

Cooper nodded, his brow furrowed, anger smoldering at Bass, every bit as plain as sun on his face.

“But they’ll let us go?” Tuttle said. “Just let us ride on out—if’n we give ’em some plunder?”

“That’s the way I read the sign, boys,” Silas replied.

Then Bass declared, “Looks to me like we gotta figger out just how good it might turn out to be—us trapping here in Crow country.”

“What you think of us hanging back in this country, Silas?” Billy asked.

For a moment Cooper was silent; then with a smile he turned to Bass. “Let’s ask Scratch what he thinks we ought’n do.”

“I say we give ’em presents,” Titus was quick to answer. “Never know when it might turn out good to have us friends like these up here close to Blackfoot country, don’t you think?”

“Never thought of that,” Tuttle mused.

“What it cost us?” Hooks asked.

“Hardly nothing. A couple of horses and a blanket here, maybe a few beads or tin cup there,” Titus responded.

“That all they asking, Silas?” Hooks inquired, long ago conditioned to believe in Cooper, still doubtful of what Bass was telling them.

“By damn, Billy—if Scratch ain’t picked up enough sign to know fat cow from poor bull!” Cooper exclaimed with grudging admiration. “S’pose y’ go ahead on and tell us what else these ol’ bucks said ’bout keeping all our plunder for theyselves.”

With a jerk Tuttle twisted near fully around at that. “They gonna rob us of ever’thing?”

Cooper winked faintly, saying, “Y’ wanna tell ’em, Scratch? Or y’ want me to?”

“I s’pose if you’re asking me to tell Billy and Bud the bad news,” Bass began, then sighed. “These here Crow say we can walk on outta here just the way we walked in … ’cept we have to leave Hannah and the horse with the rest they took from us.”

“Or?” Cooper prodded, looking all the more smug.

“Or the Crow say we can pay ’em for their beaver—which means we can keep ever’thing what’s ours, and …”

Exasperated, Tuttle whined, “And?”

“And,” Bass paused, winking at Cooper, “we been invited to stay on till spring.”

The River Crow moved four times that winter, migrating each time to another traditional camping spot in another sheltered valley where wood and water were available, where the wind by and large kept large patches of the autumn-dried meadow grasses blown clear of snow. Every few weeks when the firewood became scarce and the last of the grass was cropped down, when the game grew harder to scare up and the campsites began to reek with human offal and that stench of an abundance of gut-piles, Big Hair’s River Crow set off behind one warrior band or another chosen by the elders to have the honor of selecting the valley where their brown and blackened lodges would next be raised.

Not only were they a handsome people, but the Crow turned out to be less haughty and arrogant than Titus had taken them to be at first. Whereas the Ute had welcomed the white men immediately, Big Hair’s band were a little slower to accept their winter visitors. But once they had warmed up to the trappers, the Crow turned out to be warm and generous hosts. As time went on, in fact, Titus discovered them not only to have a keen sense of humor—but they enjoyed playing practical jokes on one another … and on their guests.

“Silas!” Billy Hooks was bellowing as he came tearing out of the lodge where he had been taken by a clan elder, near naked.

To the four white men, it seemed like nothing new—just what had been the Crow’s practice all winter long: one man or another would present a wife or daughter to one of the trappers for a few nights, usually no longer than a phase or the moon. This day the trappers had been seated in the afternoon sun around a fire with more than a dozen warriors, smoking, talking in sign, practicing either their pidgin English or their stunted knowledge of Crow, when a clan elder came up to lead Billy off to a nearby lodge. While Billy frequently turned and winked, rubbing his crotch a time or two in lewd anticipation, the others watched.

And when the lodge door went down and all grew quiet, the men at the fire went back to their easy chatter and midwinter socializing. Suddenly Hooks burst from the lodge completely naked but for the buckskin shirt he desperately fought to clutch around his midsection as he stumbled and fell on the slick ground, clawed his way to his feet again, and raced for the fire, screeching.

“Dammit, Silas!”

As Cooper and Tuttle shot to their feet, Bass instead glanced at some of the brown faces gathered at that fire ring. Strange, he thought, that the dark eyes showed no surprise at this turn of events, no alarm.

“Don’t y’ want that squaw they give y’?” Silas demanded as the sputtering Billy approached, shuddering like an aspen leaf in autumn. Gazing over Hooks’s shoulder, Cooper and the others watched the woman emerge from the lodge, a blanket wrapped around what was clearly an otherwise naked body.

“H-her?” Billy squeaked, sliding to a stop on the slushy snow right in front of the giant trapper.

“For balls’ sake, Billy! She’s a looker,” Tuttle agreed, nodding.

“Damn now, Billy,” Cooper said, grasping Hooks’s shoulder with one big hand, “if’n y’ don’t want the slut—I’ll rut with her for a few days my own self.”

As the others appraised the squaw, Bass was again glancing in turn at the faces of the Crow men. By now the eyes were crinkling, and sly grins were beginning to crack the masks of indifference. A few even held hands over their mouths to stifle laughter, and for the first time Titus noticed the women gathering here and there in knots between the lodges, having halted their work at hides or child care to whisper and watch.

Hooks shook his head, eyes as big around as conchos, as he sputtered, “B-but … she ain’t a—”

Silas whirled Billy around and pushed him back toward the blanket-wrapped squaw. “G’won now and climb on that slut’s hump, Billy boy!” he roared. “Or I’ll do it for y’!”

“Silas?” Hooks pleaded, his feet locked in place, skidding across the snow as the insistent Cooper pushed him along.

“Listen—y’ bonehead idjit. Y’ don’t poke your stinger in ’er—I sure as hell gonna do it my own self!”

“B-but, Silas … she don’t—”

“Come to think of it,” Cooper suddenly interrupted, shoving his way past Hooks as he took off in that long-legged, lumbering gait of his, headed for the woman. “She’s a good-lookin’ wench, ain’t she? Y’ done wasted your bet, Billy. Think I’ll dip some honey out o’ her pot first off afore y’ get her all bumfoozled.”

Scratch had to agree—the woman was real pleasant looking: nice featured with a gentle nose and almond-shaped eyes, her glossy hair braided, one long twist spilling over a smooth-skinned bare shoulder. But the way these Crow fellers were acting …

From a standing start Hooks burst into a blur, shooting past Cooper to reach the woman just a heartbeat before Silas came to an abrupt stop before them both.

“Told y’, Billy: had y’ your chance’t. Now step ’side and let the booshway wet his whang in this’un first.”

“Ain’t … she ain’t what you think, Silas!”

When Cooper gave Hooks a playful shove aside and took him another step toward the woman, Billy leaped right back, saying frantically, “Silas—you cain’t … you ain’t gonna—”

It was then Cooper took the woman by the one bare arm she had exposed, clamping the blanket to her body, and turned the squaw back toward the lodge—his eyes clearly feasting on that bare shoulder.

“Tried to tell you, Silas!”

And that’s when Billy did the unthinkable. He grabbed hold of the woman’s blanket and began tugging. Immediately she wheeled away from Cooper and began pulling back on the blanket. Silas lunged for them both—seizing hold of Billy’s wrist.

“Leave her the hell be!” Cooper roared, shoving Hooks backward with a mighty heave. “Slut’s mine now!”

But as Hooks fell, the woman’s blanket came loose—and all hell came loose with it.

Billy sprawled in a heap on the snow. Cooper whirled, visibly shuddered—then stood frozen, staring openmouthed at the naked squaw. Tuttle was already on his feet, but now he too stood rooted to the spot, unable to comprehend what had just occurred.

Slowly, at first, the Crow men began to laugh—almost as one, as if on cue. Behind and all around their men, the women giggled too. Then every Crow in that camp seemed to be laughing, so hard that a mighty din it made that winter afternoon beneath the bare branches of the cottonwood.

For a moment all Cooper could do was point down at the figure naked before him, his arm trembling. Then he hobbled a halting step back, and a second, his mouth moving up and down. Lunging for Hooks, he pulled his naked friend off the ground as Billy fought to keep himself covered from all the Crow eyes.

Seething, Silas roared, “Why—y’ think this is some good laugh on me, don’t y’, Billy?”

As Cooper shook him slowly back and forth, they both stumbled back another step. Hooks tried to explain, “I-I didn’t know when she took me in!”

As Cooper and Hooks stumbled out of the way, Bass clearly saw what the Crow had been smiling about. The moment Silas moved back, Billy in tow, Titus saw it wasn’t a beautiful young woman at all. Instead, it was a very pretty, thin-boned young man, vainly trying to wrench his blanket back from Billy … and as he did, his very apparent male appendage wagged in the cold winter air.

“She’s a … a man!” Tuttle gushed.

“I’ll kill y’, Billy Hooks!” Silas vowed, nearly heaving Hooks off the ground.

“I didn’t do nothing!” he shrieked.

“Cooper!” Bass hollered, starting to rise. “Cain’t you see it’s their joke on Billy?”

At Scratch’s words Silas jerked around, still clutching Hooks in both paws. “Their … joke?”

“Yeah—I figure they knowed just how much Billy likes him his ruttin’,” Titus said with a shrug. “I’ll wager they thought they’d pull on his leg a bit.”

Cooper shook Billy once. “Y’ didn’t know nothing ’bout this?”

“How c-could I, Silas?”

By then Bass was making sign, asking his questions of the Crow men, getting his answers amid the laughter the warriors were sharing. One hand on the scruff of Billy’s neck, Cooper watched too. After a few minutes Silas burst out laughing, so hard he had to let go of Hooks and bend over at the waist.

“Say, Billy,” Titus explained, “from what I can tell, looks like this here wasn’t all that much a joke, after all. Seems like ever’ now and then the Crow have a boy what don’t wanna grow up a man.”

Glancing quickly at the young man, who wrapped the blanket about himself, then whirled on his heel to head back to the lodge, Billy asked, “He d-don’t wanna be a man?”

Scratch went on to attempt making sense of what to those four white men was the inexplicable, what was totally foreign to their world and time: this concept of a very powerful medicine the Crow believed those young boys possessed who did not want to learn the skills it would take to assume the role of a warrior but instead preferred to play with the girls, learning the ways of the lodge and how a woman was to care for her man. Rather than to chastise such boys for their differences and preferences, the Crow looked upon these young men as having been anointed by the Grandfather Above with some very special, and powerful, medicine.

Indeed, among these people there was no such thing as homosexuality. Quite the contrary—these rare and respected individuals actually believed themselves to be women spirits imprisoned in a man’s body. The Crow revered such powerful medicine no less than they revered their clan leaders, war-society leaders, and women warriors.

Scratching at his scruffy brown beard, not in the least attempting to disguise a silly smirk, Bass chuckled and went on to explain, “Way the Crow see it, Billy—you was the sort of hoss what likes his ruttin’ so much”—then for a moment Titus dug a toe at the ground, trying his best to suppress more of a giggle before he could continue—“they figgered to give you a crack at something a bit different in them ruttin’ robes, Billy!”

Came to be that Bird in Ground proved to be a steadfast friend to Titus that first winter the four spent in Absaraka, home of the Crow. After being shunned by both Hooks and Cooper, days later the young man/ woman offered himself as a partner to Titus. But without embarrassment or shame this time, Scratch was able to get across that while he did not hanker to set up lodge keeping with the Crow man, Titus nonetheless wanted to be a friend.

As the days deepened in the coldest heart of the winter, Bird in Ground took to riding out with Bass when the white man ventured off to set or check his traps in the surrounding countryside. Oh, at first there was some talk among the village folks—that much Scratch learned from Bird in Ground over the hours and days and finally weeks they spent together. There along the creeks and streams that fed the mighty Yellowstone, Bass and his Crow friend began to teach one another the first rudiments of one another’s native tongues.

In those dark, cold hours well before sunrise, Bird in Ground would bring his pony to join Scratch at the trapper’s wickiup—a crude shelter made from lodgepole saplings, willow branches, and an old, discarded, much-blackened lodge cover where Bass laid out his bed and cooked his meals when not spending a rare night coupling with a Crow woman or having supper with a family somewhere off in the village. For the most part, Scratch survived that winter, when he turned thirty-three, without the company of a full-time night woman. Not that the hungers didn’t stir him at inopportune times, but for the most part there always seemed to be a woman available just when he needed one the most that season of the Cold Maker. So while the other trappers made lounging and women, talking and more women, their winter activities, it didn’t take Titus long to realize he had a lot of idle time on his hands.

Just didn’t seem to make all that much sense to him to let the days go by with nothing more than another notch carved on a calendar stick to show for the passage of time. But when he had told Silas, Billy, and Bud of his intention to go back to working the surrounding streams, not one of the three showed any evidence that they were all that interested in joining him in his labors, there in the heart of winter. Evidently they were much more content to wait until the first arrival of spring before any of them freed the thick rawhide tie straps from the tops of their leather trap sacks. True enough and no two ways of Sunday about it: trapping was hard enough work—made all the more miserable still in the winter when a man had to sloe through thigh-deep wind-drifted snow just so he could closely examine the banks along the icy ribbons of streams or the caked shores of beaver ponds to find just where the animals traveled now that winter had frozen their domain solid.

But time was what Titus was rich in that winter. A man with a bounty of time, Bass used his wisely so that by the coming of the spring hunt he found himself already a wealthy man in fine, dark, glossy beaver plews.

Even before Silas Cooper’s outfit was ready to push on west toward the fabled Three Forks country.