Death Rattle

26

That winter the cottonwoods boomed with the bone-jarring cold … but the worst was yet to come.

For the next three winters a deep, unrelenting cold was visited upon the north country, keeping the men close to their lodge fires, yearning for spring when they could return to stealing horses, raising plunder, and squandering the finest seasons of their young lives.

Far too cold that no tribe did much raiding until the weather finally warmed weeks after the equinox. Altogether, it was a string of four winters unlike any the Crow had ever known—four years when the tribe wrapped itself in a growing sense of invincibility and security that come each winter, no thoughts of danger or guarded wariness need trouble all of Absaroka.

But through each spring, summer, and into the early autumn before that first freeze … it was a celebration of the old life. Throughout the land those few men who could remember a time before the coming of the whites were growing long in tooth and dim of eye, their shoulders stooped with age and their infirmities, eyes rheumy with their years, their exploits, their memories a great and glorious day now gone on the winds.

That first of those next four winters was a time that was like no other Bass had experienced among the Crow. And he knew that come a day soon no man alive would ever remember the halcyon days before beaver pelts and buffalo robes changed everything in the northern mountains forever.

When he had first come among the Absaroka long ago, Titus was as an outsider—wintering with the three thieves who posed as partners. Although befriended by Bird In Ground, the young Apsaluuke with a powerful man/woman medicine, Bass had remained an outsider until he returned to the Crow alone. Eventually he took a Crow woman in the manner of the country, and she birthed their half-breed children. Yet, despite how much his old friend Arapooesh had hoped for the acceptance of his white friend, the band was reluctant to treat him as one of their own. Even after he stood beside his woman in the promising ceremony, or went to avenge the Blackfoot bringing the pox south of the Yellowstone, or when he named his third child in the old manner of things … he still could not shake that sense of aloneness, of standing apart from his wife’s people.

No, it was not until that next spring after the naming when he did not make ready his horses, did not load burdens upon them, and did not depart for weeks, even moons, on end in that way of a white man. Instead, he stayed. Most of the Crow expected him to pick up and be gone one of those bright spring days, but he stayed. Word among them rumored of the promise he had made to his wife and their children.

“He has come to the blanket,” someone said. “Now he wants to be one of us.”

“Perhaps,” others agreed guardedly, “but—we all remember the stories of the Medicine Calf^* and how he took to the blanket, only to forsake us when it suited him.”

“This one is not like Medicine Calf,” another would say assuredly. “Medicine Calf was lured and seduced back to the land of the white men. But the gray-bearded coyote, Waits-by-the-Water’s man … he left nothing behind there in the land of the white men. He claims no family, no friends back there. He knows no other home but this.”

Titus Bass stayed on, season after season—while other white men had always come and gone, like footloose transients come only in search of the furs before they were gone again. Now the beaver trade had breathed its last—a final, wheezing death rattle all could hear rumble with its final gasp. No more did the Crow happen upon any trapping parties, much less the huge brigades that used to winter anywhere from the big bend of the Yellowstone east to the Bighorn, perhaps as far as the Tongue. The only whites they chanced to see now were a trader and his engages who sat out the seasons in their tiny post at the mouth of one river or another on the Yellowstone.

Rumors floated into Absaroka of traders far to the south, said to have built their posts somewhere on the lower Green River where, so the Snake and Bannock tribes told Crow hunting parties, Big Throat Bridger had stacked up log walls and begun housekeeping with his Indian family and a few white partners.

But up in this country, the era of the white man was behind them now. The only white face any of them ever saw outside of that of the post trader’s was an aging, wind- and sun-ravaged face that Titus Bass had dragged around with him for seasons beyond count. He had stayed. Because they saw he did not leave in the way of all other white men, the Crow gradually came to accept him as part of their lives. With every season he became more like them: his children growing up among theirs, hunting with their men, joining with the other old warriors to counsel those young men gathering in war parties or preparing to set off on raids into foreign lands. He and old fighters like him always stayed behind to guard Absaroka, to protect the camp, if need be to put their lives between the enemy and their women and children.

While the young men rode far and wide carrying forth the glory of the Crow, it was always the old warriors who stood as the last great fortress of Absaroka—arrayed like a bulwark there against the many Blackfoot to the north, the Cheyenne on the south, and those Lakota who were migrating out of the east. The old men knew what the land of the Crow had always been … and they stood ready to defend what they prayed Absaroka always would be. So Titus Bass stayed.

How often in those circles of the seasons did he look back on those glorious days following the naming ceremony!

With the help of his children, each cold morning Scratch loaded up one of the packhorses with two great bundles of goods and walked through the camp. At the poorest of lodges the three of them would stop and he would ask what that family could most use—a new, thick blanket, perhaps? Or maybe a kettle? Some cloth for a new dress or to wrap up a young child?

“A man who holds too tightly to his riches,” Titus reminded his children during their daily ritual, “he will forever stay a poor man in the eyes of others. But a man who lets his riches flow from his fingers—”

“He,” Magpie finished his oft-repeated admonition, “is a man who is rich beyond compare in the eyes of his people.”

“To give away his wealth,” young Flea repeated his father’s moral, “is what marks a man truly blessed by the Creator Above.”

So a brass kettle went to some, an iron skillet to others, and those new blankets to shelter one from the brutal cold that had visited itself upon the north country. And there were earrings, rolls of brass wire, and domed tacks for decoration he put in the hands of many of Yellow Belly’s band. A rainbow of colorful ribbon, tiny waxed packets of vermillion, not to mention a myriad of other small tools, decorations, and sewing goods he pulled from his packs like a peddlar as he and the children inched their way through camp for the next four days. Something for every lodge, especially those families who needed the most. This sharing of riches was a lesson like no other he could teach his children.

What joy it was to return to the lodge when they were done with their day—finding it warmed by a merry fire, the babe asleep, its tummy filled, and Waits-by-the-Water busy at supper, or working her colored quills onto some strip of soft antelope hide, or sewing up a new pair of moccasins for one of the children. More times than not, their feet outgrew old moccasins before those moccasins wore out.

After nearly a moon at this site, the crier brought word that they would move in two days. Time to pack up, make ready with what they owned, repair old travois hitches. The grass was gone, the firewood too. Besides, the camp had begun to stink with the offal and refuse of those hundreds.

Less than a dozen slow miles away, the camp chiefs had already decided upon a new site nestled in the lee of a hill. While the spot did not possess any meadows near as free of snow as the last camp, Yellow Belly’s people did find plenty of wood, and some open water where a spring fed a nearby creek even though most every other stream was frozen from bank to bank.

For days at a time throughout the long and horrid winters, the Crow were imprisoned in camp, if not in their lodges, unwilling to brave the terrible winds and brutal temperatures brought with each new storm. But the weather always moderated, the sun reappeared, and the first, resolute hunting parties embarked in search of what game would be out to feed with the passing of the storms.

It didn’t take long for him to realize that life was growing easier than he could ever remember it having been. Almost from the time he ran away from the homestead and put Boone County at his back, Titus Bass had made a living from the muscles in his back and the sweat of his brow. But it wasn’t brawn that allowed him to endure. Some might well claim he had survived more by virtue of his wits than by his wisdom—so be it. Whether it was toting up bales and baggage at riverport towns on the Ohio or the Mississippi, or sweating over anvil and forge in St. Louis, even unto immersing himself up to the balls in high-country streams little more than liquid ice for months at a time—nearly every function of his life over the past twenty-some winters Out here in the mountains had aged his body that much quicker than it would have aged had he stayed back in those peaceful, predictable settlements.

In adapting to life with the Crow he lulled himself into peaceful rhythms that most suited a man who had celebrated half a hundred birthdays. Last out the long winters, do some hunting, maybe run a daytime trapline come each spring if he took a notion to and a stretch of country looked promising, help others break and breed the horses all summer through, then pay a visit to the trader downriver when autumn turned the cottonwood to gold …

“Well I’ll be jigged—you’re a white fella,” exclaimed the man stepping from the open gate of his log post, peering up at Titus Bass before he glanced over those warriors and women, children and old people, all arrayed across the prairie behind Scratch. “From a ways back, you looked about as Injun as the rest of them you brought with you.”

“Guilty there,” Titus answered with a smile. He held down his hand to the man. “Name’s Bass.”

“Murray,” he replied with a real burr to the r’s.

“Met a fella same name as you down to Bents Fort last fall. You related?”

“Don’t have any relations in the country,” Murray admitted.

“Mite s’prised to see a man’s built anything here on the river,” Titus said as the last of the Crow came up noisily and started to dismount in the meadow nearby. “If’n it don’t make you no nevermind, this bunch’ll make camp here for the night.”

“Where you bound downriver?” Murray inquired.

“Tullock’s post near the mouth of the Tongue.”

“Tullock is no longer there,” Murray explained. “Last I heard he’s nowhere to be found on the upper river. Don’t know where he’s gone.”

“Don’t say?” Bass replied with a little suspicion.

“And his old post, Van Buren, is no longer there. We burned it last autumn.”

That struck him as downright criminal. “Why the devil you burn Tullock’s post for?”

“Under orders to, by Culbertson, company factor up at Fort Union. A year ago May he sent ten of us upriver with Charles Larpenteur in charge, ordered to close down Van Buren and build this post.” Murray held out both arms expansively to indicate the compact log stockade enclosing the post that stood no more than one hundred feet square. A handful of stone chimneys constructed of river rock poked their blackened heads above the eight-foot walls.

Bass cleared his dusty, parched throat. “So this here’s American Fur?”

“And me as well. I’ve been the trader for more’n nine months here already,” Murray admitted. “Larpenteur was called back to Union last November—so it’s just me and four engages.”

Titus finally swung to the ground as his wife and children came out of their saddles. “So Tullock and Van Buren ain’t no more.”

“No, sir. You know Tullock long?”

“Me and him go back some. What’d you name this place?”

“Larpenteur named it for our chief factor.”

“Fort Culbertson?”

“No. We’ve blessed it with our factor’s first name,” Murray declared. “You’re standing at the walls of Fort Alexander.”

Over the next few days the visiting Crow went about their business with the powerful company that had brought an end to both the beaver business and the mountain rendezvous, the economic giant who had crushed a glorious way of life in its mighty fist. It surprised Titus to discover he was still sore having to deal with American Fur again, but he reminded himself he’d done it before. What few furs he had managed to trap the previous spring did garner some shiny geegaws for the children, a few yards of wool cloth for Waits, and that much-needed powder and bar lead. Their trading done with Murray at this new Yellowstone post, Yellow Belly’s band turned about on the fifth morning and started upriver once more.

That second winter began early and proved to be even harder than the last. Spring was long in coming. Because the weather had made them prisoners, few of the Crow had many furs to trade on their next journey down the Yellowstone to Fort Alexander.

“Murray here?” Titus asked the figure stepping from the gate as he and two dozen of the Crow men dismounted in advance of the village.

At first the solidly built man did not acknowledge his question; instead, he shaded his eyes that early autumn day and noted the dust haze rising over the hundreds of Crow who were steering their herds into the expansive meadow filled with grass already cured by the first frost.

“No, Murray doesn’t work here no more,” the stranger replied as his eyes finally came back to look upon Bass.

After another full round of seasons spent listening to nothing but the Crow tongue, Scratch’s ear picked up a strong Scottish accent, all that much heartier than Murray’s brogue. “You in charge?”

“No. The factor’s named Kipp.”

“He here?”

“Inside. Come with me,” the man offered, then he gestured at the Crow men. “Three of them at a time, only.”

Scratch hit the ground and rubbed his aching knees. With the advent of every year he resented that pain brought of being in the saddle a little more. Holding out his hand, he said, “I’m Titus Bass.”

“Robert Meldrum,” the man answered, brushing a thick shock of sandy brown hair from his eyes. “You live with this band I see.”

“With my wife, young’uns too.”

Meldrum surprised Scratch when he turned to face the throngs of Crow men and suddenly began speaking loudly, in a respectable Crow. “Your chiefs must decide who among you will be the first to come inside and smoke before trading. We’ll set the prices, then the trading can begin in earnest after sunrise tomorrow.”

As the headmen gathered to discuss who would accompany the trader into the fort, Bass grabbed the white man’s elbow. “You speak good Crow, Meldrum.”

“Had some practice,” the trader replied.

“Figgered you for a Scotchman, from the sound of your words.”

“I’m Scots, that’s for sure,” Meldrum admitted with a characteristic burr. “Born on the moors in the second year of the century. Came to Kentucky with me parents.”

“You’ve been out here for some time,” Titus observed.

“Came west with Ashley’s trading caravan in twenty-seven. Didn’t go back with the other clerks after rendezvous.”

“Twenty-seven …” And he pondered the roll of sites. “I recollect that’un was held over at the bottom of Sweet Lake.”^*

“Still some small affairs back then,” Meldrum declared as he kept his gray eyes pinned on the Crows’ deliberations. “But they got bigger.”

“An’ noisier too,” Scratch said. “So how come you speak such good Crow?”

“Married one. It helps.”

“Damn if it don’t. Haven’t got me no idee how a fella gets along with a Injun gal if he don’t know her tongue!”

“Most fellows, they have no intentions of sticking around long enough to learn to speak their woman’s language.”

That evening Scratch and his family were invited to sit for supper with the post’s factor, James Kipp. Even more so than Robert Meldrum, this man was clearly educated; not the usual sort who had worked his way up through the ranks on muscle.

“I heard your name afore—from a ol’ friend of mine works downriver at Fort Union,” Titus explained as they were introduced.

“Who was that?”

“Levi Gamble. Maybeso you know ’im.”

“He was a good man, a steadfast employee in his day.”

“In h-his day?” Titus echoed. “He ain’t working at the fort no more?”

“Last word I had, Gamble took to drinking, hard too,” Kipp disclosed. “Seems he lost his wife when she was burned terribly, a lodge fire as I recall. She lingered awhile, pitifully—then died in his arms.”

“Damn,” Scratch muttered under his breath, his eyes flicking quickly to glance at his woman.

“I was told Levi never got over her painful death. Immediately took to drink. On this last stay of mine at Fort Union, I heard he’d died of consumption … although I think he succumbed to a powerful combination of too much alcohol and his just plain giving up after the death of his wife.”

“This news about Levi come recent?”

“Yes. Seems I’m newly come here from Fort Union myself,” Kipp explained with a generous smile. His well-wrinkled face crinkled warmly. “It’s been no more than two weeks since the last supply steamboat came upriver and dropped me off with the year’s goods.”

“In less’n a year—this place awready had three booshways,” Scratch commented.

“It’s a fact of the business,” Kipp explained with a shrug of his shoulders. “I myself have been shuttled around from post to post since I came upriver.”

“Where you born and raised back east?”

“Born in Canada,” Kipp disclosed. “Eighty-eight. That makes me fifty-six years old now.”

Scratch folded fingers down as he calculated. “So you’re six years older’n me. An’ that’s some, Mr. Kipp. Out here I don’t run across many fellas what can say they’re older’n me.”

“Spent a lot of time among the Mandans when I first ascended the Missouri. Learned their language, could even write it too, while I was in the employ of the Columbia Fur Company.”

“Can’t say I ever heard of ’em.”

Kipp grinned. “They’re no more, Mr. Bass. Long, long time ago, they merged with American Fur—which made John Jacob Astor all the bigger.”

“You stayed on, I take it.”

The factor nodded. “They liked the cut of my timbers, so the bosses gave me the job of building Fort Floyd.”

“Ain’t heard of that’un neither. Where’s it stand?”

Kipp poured more coffee into Waits-by-the-Water’s cup as he answered, “You’ve been there: mouth of the Yellowstone. Never was known as Fort Floyd for long. It’s been called Fort Union almost from the first day.”

“Then I have been there,” Scratch confessed. “Years back, when the Deschamps family was near done in.”^*

“A most awful blood feud between those families,” Kipp clucked, then settled back atop a crate with his glass of port. “After building that post, the company partners thought well enough of James Kipp to put me in charge of raising Fort Clark back among my Mandan friends.”

“When was that?”

“Thirty-one,” Kipp answered. “A profitable year for the company.”

“Aye—them was shinin’ times. Each year beaver just kept getting better’n better too,” Bass said with a wistful smile. “You s’pose beaver’s bound to rise, Mr. Kipp?”

The trader wagged his head. “The sun has set on the beaver trade, my good man. But I must say that—in those years when beaver was king—I met some interesting people while downriver at Fort Clark,” Kipp explained. “One of the most remarkable was an American artist named Catlin, George Catlin. He was at the post, painting the Mandans left and right. The following winter, thirty-three and thirty-four, a German prince—Maximilian—came upriver on a sportsman’s holiday. He brought with him a wonderful artist who became a fast friend of mine. Karl Bodmer was his name.”

“I met a artist fella my own self once, years back at a ronnyvoo it was,” Titus chimed in. “Named Alfred Miller. You met him?”

“Can’t say as I have.”

“Miller come west with a Scotchman—a rich fella named William Drummond Stewart. That Scotchman even brung ol’ Jim Bridger a suit of armor one summer!”

“Yes, I’ve heard of Stewart,” Kipp disclosed.

“You was at Fort Clark till you come here?”

The trader shook his head. “Once my employers had their Mandan post running smoothly, I was dispatched into Blackfoot country, where I built Fort Piegan at the mouth of the Marias.”

“Damn, if you ain’t the fort-buildingest fella I ever met,” Bass enthused. “Time was, there wasn’t a post in this north country … and now the Injuns can durn well pick where they wanna go, north or south, to trade off their robes. Beaver ain’t wuth a tinker’s damn no more. Just robes. Life’s changed, Mr. Kipp. Life’s changed a hull bunch up here in the north country.”

“I detect a strong note of resignation, Mr. Bass. If not a deep regret.”

With a slight nod, Titus sighed, “Some long winter nights, I sit with my woman and young’uns by the lodge fire, thinking back on how things use to was. But the beaver are near gone most places I go, and they damn well ain’t wuth the time to scrape ’em no more anyhow. ’Sides, no fur companies like your’n ever gonna hire trappers no more—you just trade all your furs off the Injuns.”

“That, yes—but we also barter with a few of the last trappers—men like yourself who are still working the mountain streams.” Kipp scratched at his bare jowl thoughtfully, then said, “It won’t ever be the same again, my friend. God knows things won’t ever be the same again.”

“Missionaries been trampin’ through my mountains,” Scratch grumbled, feeling very possessive and protective of his shrinking world. “Bringing their white women. For now they’re just passing through on their way to Oregon country … but one of these days, I know in my gut they’re gonna stop and settle down right here in the mountains. Gonna ruin what life we got left.”

“The Jesuits have dispatched one of their own, a Father De Smet, to make contact with the northwestern tribes,” Kipp announced. “I met him at Fort Union two years ago when he came through.”

“What’s a Jesuit?”

“Of course, I couldn’t expect you to know that it’s a Catholic order of priests—”

Scratch howled with alarm, “The Papists are sending their missionaries out here too!”

“De Smet told me he attended the last rendezvous ever held, on his way to the Flathead in the summer of forty. Later that fall, he came downriver to Fort Clark, where I made his acquaintance.”

Titus wagged his head. “Even when things are changing all around me,” he declared, “I wanna believe things don’t have to change for me. Not for me and these Crow I’m running with.”

“What do you think of Mr. Meldrum here?” Kipp asked, indicating the post trader seated down the table.

“He seems to be a likeable kind.” And Bass winked at Meldrum. “Any man what speaks Crow good as he does and marries hisself into the tribe can’t be a bad sort, now can he?”

“Some of his wife’s people watched Robert black-smithing,” Kipp declared. “So the Crow call him Round Iron.”

“That’s another reason for me to like Meldrum,” Bass admitted. “Back in Saint Louie I sweated over an anvil and bellows for a few years afore I come out to the mountains.”

“You were apprenticed in your youth?” Meldrum asked.

“Nawww—was awready growed—a good trade for a man to learn,” Titus recalled with a sigh. “Meldrum ain’t the first trader your company’s sent to Crow country to get married so all the tribe’s furs come to him.”

Kipp’s eyes flashed to Meldrum for a moment before he asked, “You’re referring to the mulatto Beckwith?”

“He’s a humbug if ever there was one!” Meldrum growled menacingly.

“That’s probably the nicest thing Robert could say about the mulatto,” Kipp replied. “While Beckwith might have been on the company payroll, he never was a company man.”

“Not only is he totally without any abilities as an honest businessman, but—he’s a scoundrel of the first order!” Meldrum roared his disapproval. “Cheated whoever got within reach or was in his way: the Crow, the company, his factors—”

“Last time I see’d Jim Beckwith, was two year ago,” Titus confided. “He and a few other Americans built themselves a small trading post on the Arkansas.”

“Near the Bent brothers’ fort?” Meldrum inquired.

“Upriver a good ways, closer to the mountains.”

Meldrum snarled, “I say, let that southern country have him so the thieving bastard won’t ever show his lying face up here again.”

“Far as I know he’s settling in down there, for a fact,” Titus told them. “Got him a Mex wife, even opened up a li’l trade store too.”

“Is he even aware that some of the Crow mean to kill him if he ever returns to this country?” Meldrum disclosed.

That shocked Titus. “W-what for?”

“They think he betrayed them by living with them for so long, then suddenly leaving them to return to civilization,” Kipp explained.

“That’s right,” Meldrum added. “A few—not all, mind you—but some of the harshest warriors and headmen would love to get their hands on him, Mr. Bass. Believe me, I married into the same band Beckwith ruined with his shameless scams. There’s no affection for him among the Crow people now.”

“Damn shame,” Scratch brooded, thinking how Bill Williams appeared to hate Beckwith with this very same fury. “I knowed Jim Beckwith for almost as long as I been out here in the mountains. Shame to see what haps to a fella when he turns his back on them what was once his friends.”

Many were the times since that autumn journey to Fort Alexander when Titus reflected on how circumstances changed the folks around him—when he didn’t consider he was any different. Not from that first winter with the Yuta,^* and not from the time of his first contact with these Crow … Scratch looked back to weigh the possibility that he might have treated anyone less than the way he wanted to be treated himself. If there ever had been a code among men out here in the mountains, that was its evenhanded preamble.

But as the fates undermined the economic structure of their lives, Scratch had watched the long-held code splinter. No longer could a white man count on the help of another without question. White men stole not only from white men—just as the big fur companies did day in and day out—but desperate white men had taken to stealing from their red allies.

That whole unspoken code of honor lay in shambles by the time Scratch had followed Bill Williams and Peg-Leg Smith west to California. It was clear that the new watchword was now: every man for himself. No more camaraderie. No longer any sense of that fraternal brotherhood he had experienced in the heady heyday of the beaver trade.

As Yellow Belly’s band turned around on the Yellowstone and started up the Bighorn in the last autumn moon, something struck him for the first time. While a right-thinking man knew he never could recapture what had been … Scratch held out the possibility that, at the very least, he might well revisit old memories. And while his most glorious days were behind him now, he decided a man was due a chance to relive those seasons through reminiscence with old friends.

Not once that following winter did he ever give any serious thought to heading back east to find Hames Kingsbury or any of Ebenezer Zane’s other Kentucky riverboatmen.^* Those who hadn’t suffered a violent death in the intervening thirty-five winters surely weren’t the sort of men who left any traces of their whereabouts, from New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi all the way north to the upper waters of the Ohio River.

Then too, no man could argue there was any need of hunting down the three who had stolen a fortune in furs from him back when he first came to the mountains. More than ten years ago he stumbled across Bud Tuttle, who had become a Santa Fe trader, then hunted Billy Hooks all the way to dockside in St. Louis, finding that poor demented soul was dying fast from the venereal disease eating away at his brain. But the sweetest revenge came when Scratch watched Silas Cooper die with his own eyes.^†

And there was no sense in trying to turn back the calendar in hoping to run down his old partner Jack Hatcher. Any reunion they might have shared had been snuffed out by a Blackfoot bullet in Pierre’s Hole. Not to mention how Asa McAfferty had gripped fate itself by the throat and strangled the life out of it high in a snowy bowl at the end of a long manhunt.^††

But there had been a man who had stood at his shoulder through one skirmish and ordeal after another, a man who had lived through some of the last glory days of Titus Bass. And he was still alive … at least according to Mathew Kinkead’s claim. How long ago was it? Back in the fall of ’42, that’s when Kinkead declared the man was doing well for himself.

“Yes,” Waits-by-the-Water said with a smile as harsh winds gusted a new snow outside their lodge, “I remember your friend, Josiah Paddock. Do you remember that you believed I loved him?”

“I was pretty stupid back then.”

“You were all I wanted, Ti-tuzz.”

“I can still remember what a fool love can make of a man.”

“Love did not make you a fool,” she corrected. “It was jealousy. Blind jealousy.^* After all these winters, is your heart telling you that it must apologize to me again for thinking I did not love you?”

He gently touched her hand with his callused fingers that morning as they sat by the fire with their children. “Every day with you is like a new beginning. I am thankful for each morning like this when I awake and you are with me.”

She leaned against him, her cheek resting against his chest. “When you were away—and I believed you were gone forever—every day was a torment I could never describe to you. So I know your words are strong when you tell me how thankful you are to be here with me. I am grateful for every day, season, and year we have shared since you returned to me—not once, but twice.”

Then she gazed into his eyes. “You don’t need to bring up old memories and mistakes to make me grateful for this time we have in our lives.”

Touching her cheek, he admitted, “I asked if you remembered Josiah for a reason. You remember his wife—Looks Far Woman? Their little son, Joshua, too?”

“I remember them, and the mud lodge where we stayed in Ta-house,” she said.

“Rosa is gone,” Scratch confided. “And Mateo Kinkead has married another.”

“I hope she will make him as happy as Rosa made him when they were together in Ta-house—”

“Do you want to go?”

Waits’s brow furrowed as she looked him squarely in the eye. “Go … where?”

“Taos.”

Her eyes grew wide, and she immediately laid fingers over her lips in that Indian way of preventing her soul from escaping in unabashed wonder. She turned slightly, looking at Flea, at Magpie who held little Jackrabbit in her lap, as the three of them chewed on some dried chokecherries the children had collected last summer.

“It is so long a journey—we will take the children with us?”

He grinned, and said, “I’ve promised I wouldn’t go anywhere without my family!”

“T-to Ta-house?” she repeated.

“What is this Ta-house?” Magpie asked before Titus could answer his wife.

Waits turned to her daughter, saying, “Far, far, far to the south—farther away than I had ever gone before, or have been ever since—is a land where a people live in mud lodges, eat food that is hot on your tongue, and talk much different than the Americans where your father comes from.”

“This is the place our father wants to go?” Flea asked as he cupped some chokecherries in his hand for his three-year-old brother, Jackrabbit.

“It will be a grand adventure!” Waits cried, enthused. “It has been …”—and she counted on her fingers—“twelve summers since we left that place with our baby daughter!”

For Magpie, the enthusiasm was clearly contagious. “Do we start soon?”

Titus shook his head. “The snow is too deep and the cold would make such travel too dangerous—for a fourth winter in a row. To start out now might well kill us all. No, we won’t leave until late this summer when the buffalo are migrating south once more.”

“Ta-house.” Flea tried out the word, then turned to his father. “Popo, what will you find in this faraway place that makes you want to go back after so many summers?”

Scratch thought, then said, “Old times, and old glories, my son. But mostly … I want to find an old friend.”

^* Jim Beckwith—adopted by the Crow, he lived among them for many years, took several wives, and fathered many children before he grew weary of the diversion and abandoned his families and adopted people.

^* Present-day Bear Lake, in northeastern Utah; Buffalo Palace.

^* Ride the Moon Down

^* The Ute tribe; Buffalo Palace.

^* Dance on the Wind

^† One-Eyed Dream

^†† Carry the Wind

^* BorderLords