Ride the Moon Down

7

He saw the fear in their eyes as the Blackfoot raced toward his line.

But on their faces was written a stoic anger.

Time and again Bass had seen that loathing the Blackfoot held for the white man. No, their hatred for Americans.

The tribe put up with the British to the north, endured the Hudson’s Bay traders and fur brigades because those white men brought all sorts of useful goods, most especially the guns, powder, and lead. But the Americans traded with every enemy of the Blackfoot. With the arrival of the Americans, the Crow, Shoshone, and Flathead found a supplier of those firearms necessary to even the balance after decades of mountain warfare while a mighty, well-armed confederation of Blood, Piegan, and Gros Ventre sought to crush its poorer neighbors.

In the fading of that afternoon’s light, the Blackfoot were discovering that their firearms gave them no advantage if they could not reload them on the run. Caught unaware in the surprise attack, these hunters found they had no choice but to use weapons that would bring them face-to-face with the Crow.

Those Blackfoot closest to Bass suddenly realized there was a white man among their enemy. Just before the lines clashed, some of the warriors yelled to the others, pointing at the lone trapper—singling him out for certain attention.

“They don’t like you!” Pretty On Top shouted beside Bass as his pony pranced, barely under control.

Titus growled, “Never worried about what dead men think of me!”

A half dozen were converging on the trapper as he poked the trigger finger of his right hand out through a slot cut in the palm of his blanket mitten.

As Scratch struggled to calm his own frightened horse, an arrow slapped his leg, painfully pinning the meat of his calf against the animal. The horse sidestepped away from its pain, trying to rear back. Each time it jolted back onto all four hooves, a shock wave of nausea bolted through his stomach. Then the wounded leg popped free and he was able to swing it up, clutching the long shaft in his left hand. Snapping it off, he quickly bent down to try pushing the damned thing on out the inside of his calf when a second arrow raked along his rib cage.

Staring at the shaft fluttering there in his thick elk-hide coat, he wondered if he’d been punctured. Seizing the arrow in his left mitten, he steeled himself, ready to snap it off against his belly, when he discovered that it had pierced only his coat and buckskin shirt.

From behind him unearthly shrieks rolled toward him like a landslide.

Twisting partway in the saddle, he raised the full-stock rifle, pulled back on the rear set trigger, and clumsily waved the Derringer’s muzzle at the closest Blackfoot screaming down on him. Yanking back on that front hair trigger, Scratch watched the heavy .54-caliber ball slam the warrior back onto the rear haunches of his pony for a heartbeat before the man tumbled backward off the animal into the trampled snow.

Now as the others closed on him, in that long flintlock rifle Titus found himself holding no more than a long and very heavy club. Leaning to the right, he dropped out of the saddle and landed with most of his weight on the uninjured leg. But when he slapped the pony on the rump and sent it away, then started to step backward as he clawed at his side for the powder horn, the wounded calf gave way as soon as his weight was momentarily shifted onto it.

Pitching into the snow, Scratch realized he had no time to reload the long-range weapon. He dropped the rifle to the ground beside him, rolled onto his knees, and futilely tore at the flaps of his coat with both mittens, scrambling clumsily to seize the weapons tucked in that wide leather belt secured around the outside of his coat. Stuffing each of the mittens under an armpit, he tore them from his hands just before dragging the two big pistols from his belt, raking back the hammer on the right one.

At that moment the Blackfoot collided with the two ends of the Crow line, smashing into those two horns of the crescent.

Scratch took aim at a target closing on him, a round-faced warrior wearing a blanket cap and swinging a stone war club with a long elk-horn handle. That first pistol ball struck the warrior under the armpit, spinning him so violently he struggled vainly to clutch at the pony’s mane as the animal clattered past and the man bounced loose. Ten yards behind Bass the warrior spun to the ground, tumbling across the snow.

More shrieking yanked Scratch about to find another warrior with his bow strung, its arrow drawn back against its string to form a sharp, two-sided vee. Swapping the pistols, Bass ripped the hammer back and pulled the trigger—an instant after the string snapped forward.

Flinging himself backward, Bass fell into the snow as the arrow slammed into the icy crust between his knees.

For a heartbeat he stared at the quiver of the shaft and its fletching, then jerked up to find the bowman on top of him, slashing out with the bow. Twisting to the side out of its way, Titus watched the warrior coming off the pony, flying spreadeagled through the air, that bow at the end of one outstretched arm.

He slammed into the white man, driving the air from their lungs as Scratch rolled them over, throwing his arm behind him to find his knife. Instead, his fingers struck the frosty head of the belt ax.

The muscular Blackfoot grabbed the white man’s throat with one hand, his fingers closing around the windpipe as the warrior began to flail at the white man’s head with the bow in blinding flashes.

Dragging the ax into his hand, Titus swung wildly, eventually slamming the side of the blade against the warrior’s head. In bringing his arm back for another blow, he twisted the tomahawk in his hand. This time the blade sank deep, splattering hot blood and brain matter into Bass’s face.

He had to unlock the dead man’s legs from his before he could struggle to his knees and wrench up the first of the pistols. With some of the Blackfoot retreating back down the hill into the flat where more of their number were fighting furiously against the trap that had closed around them, some of those who were dismounted were taking cover behind the huge buffalo carcasses rising like dark, hairy boulders against the bloody snow.

With that first pistol reloaded and stuffed into his belt, Bass lunged across the Indian’s body to scoop up the second pistol. After blowing snow from the pan, he reloaded it, snapped the frizzen down over the pan again, and jammed it into his belt. Back up the hill a few yards lay the rifle, its barrel buried in the snow right up to the lock’s hammer.

“White man!”

He looked up to find Strikes-in-Camp gleefully reining his pony to a halt nearby.

The young warrior asked, “Where is your horse, white man?”

“I fight better on foot,” Bass growled.

“Forget your firearms,” Strikes snarled. “Come with me and fight the enemy close today! Come fight like a real man!”

With a wild laugh the warrior spun his horse around savagely, kicking it in the ribs as he shot back down the slope toward the hottest of the fighting.

By then Pretty On Top and the others had driven the Blackfoot back, throwing them against the warriors Whistler and Turns Plenty led. They had the Blackfoot surrounded. On the hillside above him the women were screaming, keening, crying out to their men.

Surrounded by the enemy, goaded by their women, the Blackfoot could only be made bold by their desperate straits—or stupid, willing to grasp at any chance before they died.

One of them was about to do just that.

Near the center of that buffalo killing field the Blackfoot warrior stood, waving his smoothbore fusil at the end of his arm, his mouth a wide O as he hollered at the rest who were beginning to withdraw from the shelter of their buffalo carcasses and stream toward their leader. It reminded Scratch of a black cloud of sparrows as they dipped this way, then that, low in the sky overhead. Suddenly the leader took off, his warriors strung out on either side of him, racing for the hills.

In an instant Bass could see that they really weren’t making for the distant slope. Instead, they were sprinting for the weakest part of the Crow line where Strikes-in-Camp and a handful of others were all that stood between the Blackfoot and escape. On the far side of the valley, Scratch could tell that Whistler saw things taking shape at the same moment. The old warrior was yelling and waving even as he started his pony loping to head off the enemy.

Bass was already on his way down the hillside, whistling in the cold air, licking his lips to whistle again for the pony which raised its head and started his way.

Instead of waiting for the others, instead of slowly backing up the slope to delay the clash, Strikes-in-Camp taunted his fellow warriors into joining him in a headlong dash toward the Blackfoot spearhead coming their way. Near the bottom ground the enemy swept around the half-dozen Crow, swallowing them whole the way a mountain lion swallowed a deer mouse in one bite.

The Crow warriors disappeared beneath a roiling mass of arms and weapons, dragged one by one from their horses.

Whistler and the others were closing in on the slaughter as some of the Blackfoot broke from the six unhorsed Crow and lunged up the slope to make their escape. The older warrior waved at the enemy seeking to flee—sending more than ten of his fighters to seal off any chance of escape. Then Whistler continued into the fray to save his son and the others.

Dragging himself atop the pony as the injured calf cried out in pain, Scratch slapped the rifle’s buttstock against its rear flank to put it into a gallop as they raced across the bottom, weaving through the bloody buffalo carcasses.

As more Crow reached the scene, the Blackfoot spread out to meet the charge the way a pebble dropped into a still pond would radiate widening rings around it. Bodies struggled on the ground at the center of the melee, Blackfoot finishing off the six Crow.

Into that contest Whistler plunged on horseback, swinging a long war club first on one side of his horse, then on the other, as he desperately cut himself a swath through the enemy to reach his son.

Bass was starting to rein up when he saw that Blackfoot leader who had rallied his warriors leap to the side, coming into the open. The short fusil he had been waving was now shoved against his shoulder. And aimed at Whistler.

Smoke puffed from the muzzle.

Even as the low boom rang out, Bass watched the impact jerk Whistler up straight, his war club tumbling from his hand as he fought to stay atop the horse. With both hands he clawed for the single horsehair rein he had dropped. In desperation both hands knotted themselves into the pony’s mane as it pranced round and round in a tight circle, more Blackfoot closing in on the war-party leader.

Scratch drove his pony over two, then a third warrior, spinning them aside, crushing one beneath the runner’s hooves as he lunged to reach the injured Whistler. Reaching the scene as a pair of the enemy on foot were clawing at the wounded horseman, attempting to yank Whistler off the back of his frightened horse, Scratch pulled the loaded pistol free, aimed, and fired at a narrow back. The enemy warrior nearly crumpled in half backward as he spilled into the snow beneath the pony’s hooves.

Reining aside, Scratch swung the empty pistol, smashing its barrel against a second warrior’s head with the loud crack of a heavy maul striking tight-grained Kentucky hickory. The warrior stumbled backward, wheeling round to gaze up at the white horseman as he collapsed across a jumble of legs and arms as others wrestled in the snow.

“Go!” Bass ordered Whistler. “Get to the hillside—”

“I … I can’t hold on,” he said weakly, beginning to sink off the side of his pony.

“Get to the hillside!” Scratch repeated. “Don’t let go until you are at the top of that hill!”

Then the white man slapped the back of the pony with the pistol’s long barrel, making it leap away. He watched Whistler clutching both his arms around the horse’s neck as it bounded through the milling warriors. Shiny blood streamed down the Crow’s leg, slicking a huge, dark patch that ran down the pony’s side as it raced up the gradual slope, away from the fighting.

A few yards away the Crow were just striking the Blackfoot who had swallowed up Strikes-in-Camp and his companions. The six were nowhere to be seen. Titus figured they were likely dead already as he jabbed heels into his pony’s ribs and loped toward the bitter hand-to-hand fighting as the Blackfoot suddenly turned from mauling the few to preparing to meet the many.

Racing in at an angle, Bass reached the enemy just as the Crow clattered into the Blackfoot formation. Slowly, slowly the enemy backed, swinging, slashing, shrieking with all the fury they had left as their women continued to yell and scream from the nearby hill.

On the ground nearby, two of the enemy still struggled over one of the Crow, both of them working at pinning down the arms and legs as they swung their weapons for the kill. Dragging their victim over onto his side, one of the Blackfoot struck the back of the Crow’s neck with a glancing blow. Scratch watched all the fight pour out of the valiant warrior. The second Blackfoot raised his heavy tomahawk at the end of his arm, its iron blade glinting dully in the falling sun as Scratch pulled out his second pistol, dragged at the big gooseneck hammer, and seized the trigger.

He felt it buck in his hand as it spat fire and a billow of gray smoke.

Clawing at his back, the Blackfoot twisted about wide-eyed to stare at Bass a moment before he pitched into the snow, dead beside the Crow he was ready to kill.

Yet the first was already seizing hold of the Crow’s tall, greased, provocative forelock, yanking the warrior’s head back as he dragged a huge dagger from its scabbard, prepared to cleave the Crow’s throat like a bled pig his grandfather would prepare for the smoke shed.

Scratch threw the empty pistol at the Blackfoot. Its barrel slashed across the warrior’s cheekbone, making him jerk aside for an instant, gazing up at the white man descending on him.

That instant was all Bass needed.

He rode the pony right over the Blackfoot, shoving himself sideways out of the saddle as the warrior fell backward the moment the horse stomped over him. Seizing the hand that held the dagger in both of his, Scratch slammed it against the snowy, frozen ground again and again until the knife tumbled out. Then with a bare fist he smashed the warrior in the face, watching the man’s cold skin split and ooze blood across the nose, over an eye. Again and again he smashed that young warrior’s face until the Blackfoot no longer struggled.

Scooping the dagger from the snow, Titus raked it across the warrior’s throat, opening a gush that flooded the ground beneath his knees, the snow turning a dirty brown beneath both the dead Blackfoot and that Crow he had been ready to butcher.

Dragging his wounded leg beneath him, Bass grabbed the dead man’s shirt and pulled him off the Crow before he seized the Crow’s shoulders and turned him around.

Strikes-in-Camp.

The dark eyes fluttered open, crimson ooze seeping from a big gash over one eye, snow crusted against that bruised, puffy side of his face. His shirt was bloody where a long gash had been opened up in his side, and his breath came short and labored as those eyes struggled to focus on the face of the man who had just saved him.

Bass realized his mistake the instant Strikes-in-Camp recognized him.

The young warrior’s eyes narrowed into slits and his bruised face drew up into a sneer.

There would never be any gratitude from that man for the one who had saved his life.

“Why were you the one who saved me?” Strikes-in-Camp growled as he shoved away the hands of those warriors who were steadying him on his feet.

Bass turned away, shaking his head in disgust. “Your father needs help.”

“Why did it have to be you, white man?” the words slammed him in the back.

The white man stopped, turned to confront Whistler’s son. “You are a Crow warrior,” Scratch explained as it grew still around them. “Your uncle was my friend. Your father, he is my friend.”

“Perhaps it would have been better for me to die than to be saved by you!”

Grimly Titus said, “One day you might just get your wish, Strikes-in-Camp.”

“Pote Ani!”

He spotted Pretty On Top and Windy Boy riding his way through the litter of carcasses and bodies, both Crow and Blackfoot. “Both of you, up the hill—help Whistler!”

The young warriors turned, spying the older man. Immediately they kicked their ponies into a lope across the side of the knoll. Leaping to the ground, the two of them helped steady the wounded man who held fast to his horse with only his arms, his legs no longer able to respond. As Scratch started up the hill, Whistler put out one arm to grip Pretty On Top’s shoulders and leaned off the horse, sliding to the ground with a deep pain graying his face.

“Rest, friend,” Bass said softly as he knelt beside his father-in-law. Quickly he turned to Windy Boy. “Go—bring us one of the Blackfoot travois and a pony to hitch it to. And bring two of those green buffalo hides. We must make Whistler as comfortable as we can for his ride home.”

The young warrior leaped onto his pony and wheeled away as Pretty On Top stepped up behind the white man’s shoulder. Across the valley the women were screaming wildly, turning to flee like a scattered nest of sow bugs as the victorious Crow warriors galloped toward them, sweeping up on both sides to capture the enemy squaws.

But here on the slope with Whistler, it grew still while the sun eased out of the sky and the air seemed so very cold of a sudden.

The warrior reached up and gripped Scratch’s forearm. “I don’t know if I can make that long journey home.”

“You will.”

“My s-son?”

“He is alive, and he will live,” Bass responded, placing his hands on Whistler’s bleeding hip. “Just as you will live.”

“Did … did my son fight well? Or did he fight foolishly?”

Titus looked up at Pretty On Top.

The young warrior bent down to declare, “Strikes-in-Camp fought well against the enemy, Whistler.”

The old warrior closed his eyes, then clenched them tight as a spasm of pain volted through him. When it had passed, he sighed and opened his eyes. “I am glad. It would not be a good thing for us both to be killed in the same battle.”

Bass could see that the lead ball had crashed through the side of Whistler’s hip but had not exited. It lay somewhere inside his gut. And the top of that left leg had been shattered by the bullet’s path. Of all the men he had known who survived injuries to live full lives without part of an arm, without part of a leg … Titus had never known of a man who had lost all of a leg, right up to the hip.

The warrior whispered, “You will tell Crane?”

“You can tell her yourself—”

“Tell Crane that I loved her.”

“We’ll be back to the village soon—”

“Promise me you will tell her,” Whistler interrupted, squeezing on Bass’s forearm with a bloody hand.

Titus felt the bitterness start to fill his chest, the utter senselessness of it. And again he realized that a man knew when he was about to die. No matter what he might say, there was no convincing Whistler that he would make it home.

“Promise me you’ll tell my daughter what happened here,” he pleaded. “And in the summers to come, you’ll tell your daughter about me.”

Scratch started to choke. “I … I’ll tell her what a fine man she had for a grand … grandfather.”

“It’s so cold,” he said.

And Scratch remembered how Josiah had uttered the very same words. “We’ll have you warm soon. Just hold on to me and we’ll get you some robes, and start a fire—”

“Where is my son?”

“He’ll be here soon—”

“I want to see my son before I die.”

“We’ll get him,” Bass promised. “Now, you just do your best not to fall asleep yet.”

“But I am tired,” Whistler confessed. “So very tired.”

“A man should be tired. It was a long journey you led us on,” Scratch said, turning quickly to see more than a dozen others coming up the side of the slope toward them. He could feel the sting of those first tears. “And a mighty battle you took us into.”

“Wait … I find it hard to see you, Pote Ani—”

“I’m right here, Whistler.”

The warrior sighed again, the death rattle in his chest. “I hear your voice, but I do not see you so well anymore. But there, just ahead of me—wait. I see the green hills.”

Turning slightly, Scratch looked to see where Whistler was pointing with his shaking hand. Nothing but the deepening indigo sky behind the cold, barren, snowy hills.

“Yes,” Titus said in a harsh whisper, his throat clogged suddenly. “I—I can see the hills too, Whistler.”

“Do you see him?”

Bass turned and looked off again in that direction. “See who?”

“There,” the warrior whispered. “It’s my brother.”

“You see Ara—” Suddenly he caught himself in saying the dead man’s name, realizing the grim significance of that vision. “You can see He-Who-Is-No-Longer-With-Us?”

Whistler lowered the hand he had been using to point into the distance. “And he has seen me too. He is waving to me. My brother … he is walking this way. He is coming for me.”

Whistler had died during that long, cold, cold night.

By the time Strikes-in-Camp came up the slope to where his father lay, Whistler was unable to speak, but he must have recognized the sound of his son’s voice. They touched hands, gripping one another while the warriors parted and allowed Windy Boy and Pretty On Top to bring the travois close.

On the far side of that range of hills where they had first spotted the enemy, the Crow war party chose a place for their camp where they built their fires, roasted some of the meat the Blackfoot had dropped in the valley, and put a guard around the eleven captured squaws. Five were tied together, and six were tied in a second group. Except for the quiet sobbing, the low-pitched keening of those women, it was a quiet, subdued camp.

Little was said the next morning as Turns Plenty ordered that the rest of the enemy horses be rounded up, that more of the travois be brought in with the green hides on them, along with more of the hump ribs and fleece from those buffalo the Blackfoot hunters had killed.

They would be going home with the squaws as their prisoners, with the enemy’s ponies and more than thirty fresh hides … but also dragging with them the bodies of eleven Crow dead.

The war party found their village south of the Yellowstone, hard under the Pryor Mountains. For more than an hour the war party stopped to prepare themselves to enter the camp, putting on fresh paint, stringing out the forty-six Blackfoot scalps on lances and medicine staffs. While the others were eager to push ahead, Bass chose to hang back among those who were dragging the eleven bodies behind their ponies. From one of the older warriors he borrowed some red paint, smearing it on his face.

Pretty On Top, then the ten other riders tending the wounded, stepped up and dipped their fingers into the white man’s palm, taking some of the red ocher and bear-grease mixture to daub across their foreheads, down their noses, over their copper cheekbones, and finally on their proud chins.

While Turns Plenty led the others into the village, Bass and the eleven brought up the rear of the procession with their war dead. As the column neared the outskirts of camp, women and children poured out to yell and cheer, trilling their tongues in celebration to see so many enemy horses and those robes. Then the first of the women realized she was not finding her loved one among those riders. She had not spotted a familiar face.

Then another, and another, and more.

Those eerie, bone-grating wails began as the squaws took to sobbing, the children to crying for lost fathers or uncles or brothers.

Solemnly the eleven entered the camp where more than three thousand Crow had formed along the route. Now the crowds parted as the travois rumbled slowly through their midst. On both sides of the procession women flung themselves on the ground, wrenching at their hair, wailing to the skies, crying so piteously it made the hair stand at the back of Bass’s neck where the cold wind tousled the ragged ends of the curly hair he had chopped off in mourning.

As the last man in the march, Scratch desperately searched the throng for Waits-by-the-Water, fearing more than anything that she would not see him and immediately suspect that he was among the eleven dead. Looking for her face in the crowd, any young woman wrapped in a blanket and holding an infant … eager to spot the lodge of Whistler and Crane.

Of a sudden he spotted her. Relief washed over him as he raised his arm to signal. She saw him, then stepped closer to her mother. At Crane’s other shoulder stood Strikes-in-Camp, supporting his mother as the travois bearing the dead started past. Crane clamped a hand against her mouth, as if attempting to stifle her cry, to swallow down her grief.

Strikes-in-Camp bent to say something to his mother just before Crane started toward one of the travois, her feet leaden, almost refusing to move.

Suddenly she crumbled there on the muddy snow, all the strength flushed out of her. Waits and Strikes-in-Camp knelt beside their mother as Bass leaped to the ground, sprinted the last few yards to the woman’s side.

The trapper turned to Waits as he started to scoop his arms beneath the small woman. “I can carry her to the lodge if you will lead—”

But Strikes-in-Camp shoved his arms aside. “I will carry my mother to her lodge.”

Standing and moving back a step, Scratch watched the young warrior lift his distraught mother from the snow into his arms. How tiny Crane looked, how frail and helpless, cradled there in her grown son’s arms.

For an instant Strikes-in-Camp’s eyes flashed at Bass as he started away with his mother, saying, “You are not of our blood. Go from here. You will never be our blood. You are not part of this family. So you must turn and go from here.”