Ride the Moon Down

14

“White wim-men?” she parroted back the two English words she heard so many of the trappers around her shouting at that moment.

“Yep,” Bass told his wife. “They say some white womens gonna be here soon.”

Waits-by-the-Water noticed how his green eyes narrowed with concern as he stared toward the mesa bordering the eastern edge of the river valley.

In Crow she asked, “You Americans really do have white women?”

He looked at her quizzically. “Course we do. Mothers and sisters. Only ones what don’t grow up to be wives are the ones what become whores.”

“Whores—I never heard that word from your tongue before.”

“A woman what lays with a man for the money he pays her,” and he turned his eyes away, staring at the growing bustle of activity as the electrifying news spread.

“Women who open their legs for men?” she asked in her language, still somewhat bewildered. “Indian women who take the beads and ribbon to open their legs for you white men?”

“Maybeso,” he admitted as he turned back to gaze down at her face. “I laid with my share of white whores back east in my day. But as long as I been out here in these mountains, as many Injun gals what I laid with, never have I thought Injun women was whores the same as white women—”

“Why not?” she interrupted, scratching the top of the dog’s head. “If I opened my legs for you men so I could get a new knife or some hawksbells, wouldn’t I be a whore like your white women?”

After some thought he eventually wagged his head. “Somehow, it don’t seem the same to me. Them whores all the time stay where the men come to lay with ’em. It’s what they do to make their living—like I trap beaver to make mine.”

“In that land where you came from, are there more whores, or more wives?”

He grinned a little, saying, “I s’pose there’s many more wives.”

She sighed, grinning herself as she snuggled against him. “A long time ago when I was a young girl and the first white men were coming to visit my people, many of us came to believe that among your people there must not be very many women.”

“Not many, eh?”

With a nod Waits explained. “We decided you must not have many women where you come from because you white men had such an appetite for our women.”

Squeezing her shoulder, he replied, “There are more’n enough white women back there. I sure as hell knew enough of the worst for me to decide I like Injun gals best.”

Gazing up at his greenish eyes, Waits felt consoled enough to say, “I am glad to hear you tell me this. When I heard the riders shouting that white women were coming, I grew afraid.”

“Afraid? Of what?”

“Afraid that you white men were growing tired of Indian women so your traders were bringing white women here to lay with you men in trade for your beaver.”

He snorted with laughter, throwing his head back a moment, then clutched her securely in both arms as the first of the riders started peeling away from the trappers’ camps, in a mad dash for the mesa that lay on the eastern rim of this valley of the Green River where the trappers and Indians always found an abundance of wood, water, and grass for their animals. Here at the mouth of Horse Creek, the Green flowed roughly west to east. South along the banks of the creek stood the lodges of two of those four visiting tribes, while west along every twist and bend in the river itself the company trappers had crowded their camps.

“I’ll lay a year’s wages that the women coming to ronnyvoo ain’t whores, woman,” he reassured her.

If not the sort to lay with men who gave them presents, she decided, then the newcomers had to be wives.

At the first noisy announcement from those riders galloping into rendezvous, Waits-by-the-Water had been very scared, believing that with the arrival of these white creatures, the trappers would have their pick, forsaking the Indian women, abandoning their Indian wives.

In her people’s oral history, it was told the white man first sent horses among the Crow, then sent firearms to the Absaroka, followed by bright, shiny, wonderful trade goods. It wasn’t long before the white man himself came among them. Each of these arrivals caused volcanic changes for her tribe. So it was natural now that she should convince herself the white man was bringing as many of his women as he had brought horses, or guns, or tin cups and hanks of beads.

Understandable that if the white man didn’t bring the women there to lie with the trappers at their summer gatherings, then the women would have to be wives. She had imagined a trader caravan chock-full of pale-skinned women, enough to provide one partner for every trapper. And some of those white women would likely have hair on their faces, just as the majority of white men she had seen in her life grew hair on their faces.

Among the Crow, neither gender grew facial hair. In coming to view beards and mustaches as a characteristic of the white race, it seemed very natural to assume that many of the white man’s women would grow the same beards and mustaches on their faces.

Still, her greatest concern about that long trader caravan bringing an untold crowd of white women the way it brought a dazzling and innumerable array of trade goods lay in her fear that the white men would abandon their Indian wives, forsake their Indian children, and return to their own kind. Waits-by-the-Water did not want to think of life without Ti-tuzz.

“The women are here to marry white men?”

He answered, “Naw, I figure they come with their husbands.”

“Among your people, can one man steal the wife of another?”

“Yes,” he answered, then suddenly looked down at her with some alarm. His eyes quickly softened as he must have read the hurt that had to show on her face. “But don’t you worry ’bout me and them white women. I had near all I could stand of their kind back east.” He embraced her fiercely. “No white woman ever gonna take me away from you.”

She gripped him tight, pressing her cheek against his chest, feeling safe there, safe enough to tell him of an old fear.

“When you left me behind with Rosa two winters ago, I was so afraid I would never see you again,” she confided as more shouts reverberated in the distance. “I feared you would be killed and I would be left to live among strangers in a land I did not know. But even more frightening, I was afraid you would stay in that country from where you came—you would find a white woman and forget about your Crow woman.”

She felt him rub his chin on the top of her head.

“You are the one I love,” he said to her in his halting Crow. “Maybe it’s only my poor luck, but every white woman I’ve knowed has been faithless to me, one way or another. For more winters than I can count, I’ve looked for one woman who would remain loyal to me, a woman who could show me that I was the most important person in her heart.”

“You are all my life,” she told him.

“You won’t be scared of no white women?”

Gazing up at him, Waits replied, “No. You have given me your promise.”

“How ’bout me taking you and Magpie to have yourselves a long look at them women?”

A slow smile crossed her face, and Waits nodded. “Yes, let’s go now and see these women creatures with their pale skin and their hairy faces.”

By the time they were saddled up, with Magpie riding behind her father, loping up to that flat mesa across the Green, more than half-a-hundred mounted trappers were racing for the head of the caravan in the middistance. Hundreds of mules and horses, along with many small two-wheeled objects her husband explained were called carts. As the trappers kicked their horses into a furious charge on the front of the pack train, Waits spotted a new sort of two-wheeled cart that appeared to be a small box sitting on its wheels, the front of the box laid open so two people could control the pair of horses attached to it.

All those trapper guns erupted with smoke, and a heartbeat later she heard the distant weapons boom from the caravan in a ragged order. Then her husband was laughing, harder than he had laughed for some time.

“Damn if them pilgrims don’t figger those boys are Injuns on the attack!” he roared, his eyes moist with tears. “Lookit ’em! Stopping that pack train and circling them carts right there to make a fight of it!”

A handful of figures at the head of the march stopped, turned, and were yelling at the pack train.

“I’ll wager the pilot for that outfit is telling ’em just what a bunch of softheaded idjits they are—being skairt of them white fellers come riding out, whooping and hawing!”

That broad front of bare-chested trappers was continuing to race for the caravan, unslowed, shouting and shrieking just like warriors as half of their number swept down one side of the incoming train, the other half tearing like demons down the opposite side. Both ends of their charge circled the other and continued their gallop back up the line of march until they reached the head of the procession where they slowed to match the pilot’s pace.

Then the ceremony began. The white man sure put a lot of importance in this matter of shaking hands and pounding one another on the back, she thought.

“C’mon, woman,” Bass said with excitement. “Let’s go show Magpie how a white gal looks.”

His pony was already bolting away, with Magpie clinging to her father’s back the way a small, chubby tick would grip the hide of an old bull as Waits nudged her horse into a gallop.

In nearing the head of the march, she expected him to slow down to the crawl the caravan was taking, but instead her husband kept galloping right on past the leaders. At times he waved that hat he had torn from his head, but he did not ease the pace.

In front of them some strange creatures bolted, starting to peel off to the right and scatter, lumbering with an ungainly gait as two young Indian boys started after the animals, yelling and whipping the air with long sticks. Then they were close enough that she recognized the scattering, bawling animals, those strange creatures the white man brought out to rendezvous every summer to pull his wagons or to give him warm milk. Strange that a race of people so prepared to fight and defend themselves like the whites would have so docile and tranquil an animal while her people grew up among the wild buffalo.

Her husband was slowing as he neared that strange small box set on its four small wheels, his horse jogging sideways to a halt with Magpie laughing merrily at the exhilarating ride. Bass waved to her with his hat. As she came racing up to yank back on the reins, she thought the white man who rode a horse beside the box wagon looked familiar. The rider pushed his hat back from his face. She smiled, recognizing the holy man who had cut the arrowhead from Bridger’s back last summer.

The holy man was smiling, waving her over, at the same time saying something to those in the shadow of the box wagon.

As Waits slowed her pony to a walk beside her husband’s horse, she felt her eyes grow big, and her chin drop. On one side of the box wagon sat a thin, sour-faced, bony creature who peered out at her with suspicion and alarm from beneath the brim of a black hat that nearly wrapped itself around the woman’s face. Dark circles hung like ugly pendants below her glaring, accusing eyes. Waits wondered if this person had ever smiled in her life, much less laughed.

Was this a white woman? No wonder the white man had such an incurable hunger for Indian women!

But the creature seated next to the hard-eyed one caused Waits to gasp. The holy man and her husband were talking at once, shaking hands while Bass dipped his head and introduced their daughter … but Waits could not take her eyes off the radiance of the fair-skinned beauty who sat alongside the mousy-haired, mean-eyed, dried-up pucker of a creature.

To her surprise this second white woman pulled her hat from her head, revealing hair the color of which Waits had seen on some white men—but never in such tight curls and ringlets. She reached up and touched one of her own black braids wrapped with strands of blue and red ribbon, bewildered to discover she almost coveted hair like this white woman’s—

“Waits-by-the-Water …”

Upon hearing her name, she turned to her husband.

“You remember Dr. Whitman?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered in English, and dropped her eyes, adding in Crow, “he is the holy man.”

Bass translated her comment to Whitman in English, then continued in Crow for her. “This woman closest to us is the holy man’s wife. Both of them are wives of holy men.”

“Not whores?”

“No,” and Titus shook his head with a wry grin that put Waits at ease with her questioning. “This is Whitman’s wife. Her name is Narcissa. Nar-Sis-Sa.”

“Nar-Sis-Sa.”

The moment the Crow woman repeated it, Narcissa Whitman smiled at her and wiped her brow with a large red bandanna, cheerfully saying, “Hello. What is your name?”

Slowly Waits repeated what her husband had taught her of the white man sounds to her name, “Waits-by-the-Water.”

Twisting halfway around on the back of his horse, Bass had managed to loop an arm about his daughter, and she was crawling over his hip to sit in front of him on the pony’s bare back.

“This here’s my daughter, Magpie,” he announced. “Tell these good folks you’re pleased to meet ’em, Magpie.”

“Pleased mee’cha.”

At the child’s tinkling reply both Marcus and Narcissa laughed, but neither the sour-faced woman nor her dull-eyed husband showed anything more than indifference bordering on contempt. Ahead of them the column was already resuming its march.

“This year we push on for the Nez Perce country,” Whitman explained to Titus as they all set off once more, continuing their descent to the river bottom. “Has Reverend Parker come in to meet us?”

With a shrug Scratch replied, “I ain’t see’d him. But I can’t say for sure, Doctor. Likely wouldn’t know him less’n someone said that’s who he was.”

“I pray he has returned,” the physician added. “He vowed he would—so to lead us back to where we are to establish our mission.”

“We will make our way through the wilderness without him if we must,” said the woman with the happy eyes.

Waits-by-the-Water found she liked the light-haired one more and more as they pressed on to the rendezvous. But the other woman’s glare made her feel self-conscious, as if that dour woman did her best to hold herself above all others by the way she peered down her nose with such haughty disdain.

When they reached the campground chosen for the supply train, the two women were helped down from their wagon while trappers scurried to provide a place to sit in the shade where the women were brought water to drink. Nearby others began to erect a large conical tent. It struck Waits as more and more white men came to gawk at the new arrivals, how those trappers fell over one another to keep the white women from having to lift a hand to help themselves.

Perhaps it was best that these two white women were hurrying on through this mountain west, she decided, best they were bound for the land of the Nez Perce far, far away. Waits-by-the-Water believed it had to be a good omen that the women did not belong to trappers, better instead that they belonged to those who were only passing through. It was plain enough that neither of the white women belonged out there—even Nar-sis-sa, despite her open friendliness. Both of them looked … soft. Not hardy enough to withstand much trial or hardship. And that was pretty much all life held in store in this brutal land.

The white men who had come to this Indian country to catch the beaver had either toughened themselves enough to survive, or they had died. Her husband explained how some of his kind had turned around and fled back to the land of the whites. Waits doubted these soft women raised inside their immobile lodges could endure a nomadic life lived outdoors through all seasons.

For now these two clearly seemed relieved to have reached this raucous white man’s gathering. Neither of them appeared to have any children, and it was pretty apparent that neither Narcissa nor the glowering one would have to raise a hand to do much of anything in caring for themselves. In fact, their hands weren’t soiled at all. Not the way dirt and soot permanently etched every knuckle and scored every wrinkle on Waits’s hands. No doubt these women didn’t know the first thing about graining a hide, chopping wood, or removing the organs of an antelope without pricking the bladder or rupturing a bowel. These white women had men who leaped right in to do everything for them. With all those trappers fluttering around like hummingbirds at a vine of sweet blossoms, it was no wonder these women didn’t know the first thing about taking care of themselves.

They didn’t have to.

The more Waits-by-the-Water watched the comings and goings in that camp, the more she decided it was a very, very good thing these women weren’t staying. Almost laughable, she thought, how these hardy, coarse men became such different creatures around their white women. Waits contented herself that the women were only passing through.

And she hoped the white men would bring no more of these soft creatures to this land.

For the first time since Bass could recollect, there were nearly as many free men come to rendezvous as there were company trappers. And a damned sight fewer of both camped this year near the mouth of Horse Creek.

Slightly more than a hundred Americans had come in with the Bridger and Drips brigades, along with no more than fifty Frenchmen between them. With the supply caravan, Tom Fitzpatrick brought in another seventy hands to wrangle more than four hundred horses and pack mules, but the lion’s share of those men would be turning right around for the States once the beaver was all bought up.

At Fort Laramie, Fitzpatrick had abandoned the long train of wagons, packing everything they couldn’t fit into nineteen two-wheeled carts onto the backs of their mules for that last leg of the journey over the Southern Pass and on to Green River. Milton Sublette, courageously recovering from the recent amputation of his leg, bounced all the way into rendezvous in one of those carts. Before he slid to the ground, Milt strapped on the cork leg purchased for him in Philadelphia by Hugh Campbell, Robert’s brother.

It brought some hot moisture to Bass’s eyes to watch that man, an unvarnished hero four years before at the Battle of Pierre’s Hole, now wobble and waver on that one good leg as old friends rushed up to hug and shake his hand as if it were a pump handle on a long-ago dried-up well. Especially the tall, slab-shouldered Joe Meek and his Shoshone wife.

Titus remembered the story fondly told of this woman and the two inseparable friends. Seasons ago Umentucken, the Mountain Lamb, had married Milton Sublette, known as the “Thunderbolt of the Rockies.” Back in thirty-two she and their young child had been with Milt’s brigade that summer morning in Pierre’s Hole when they chanced to bump into a large band of Blackfoot.

Eventually Sublette’s leg refused to heal from an arrow wound his friends claimed was poisoned. Reluctantly deciding to return east to have the infection cared for, not knowing if he would ever return to the mountains, Milt gave his wife over to his best friend, Joe Meek. For the last few years Joe had cared for this beautiful woman, raising Milt’s child as he did his own.

Shyly now, the Lamb stepped out from behind her new husband and inched up to embrace Sublette.

Not one man there mentioned the tears they saw well in Milt’s eyes, or the way he bravely snorted and swiped at his nose as the crowd pounded on his back and gawked at his new cork leg.

“By damn!” Scratch roared. “You ever think you’d have one’a your legs make it to hell afore you!”

“Shit! Don’t matter I got only one good leg,” Sublette chortled, “I can still outrun the devil hisself!”

“That’s right, Scratch!” Bridger agreed. “With you and Meek galloping to keep ahead of the devil, Milt don’t have to worry none about running the fastest … he only, gotta be fast ’nough to stay ahead of you!”

“You figger I’m so slow, the devil gonna get his claws in me, eh?”

“Damn right he will, Bass!” Milton bawled with laughter.

“One of these days, mayhaps,” Scratch confessed with a grin. “But not till I’m so old and stove-up I can’t outrun him no more … and all you niggers are already there to greet me!”

By the following day Fitzpatrick’s hands had fixed up the largest of a handful of squat log structures first erected a short distance from the Green by Captain Bonneville’s fur brigade back in the spring of 1832. Rather than hacking any windows in the crude eighteen-by-eighteen-foot square, the builders settled for what light streamed between the unchinked timbers or through the only entrance: a six-foot-wide, two-foot-high rectangle laid on its side some four feet off the ground. It was through this lone opening that furs were passed in and trade goods handed out, the better to protect against pilfering. For a roof Fitzpatrick’s Frenchmen had stretched some oiled sheeting across the timbers they laid overhead in an attempt to protect the valuable goods from those fickle summer storms known to visit this high valley.

All told, more than thirteen hundred Indians were in the valley to greet the incoming train. The Shoshone and Bannock had camped along Horse Creek, while up the Green near Bonneville’s Fort both the Flathead and Nez Perce had raised their lodges.

Moseying over to have himself a good look at the trade goods Fitzpatrick had packed out from St. Louis, Titus watched the man in fancy buckskins dismount from his showy white mule and walk up to shake hands with Bridger and Drips. Together the three of them ambled toward the awning where Milt Sublette sat in the shade.

“Who’s that in them foofaraw booshway clothes with all the red wool and blue beads?” Scratch asked of a familiar face who had turned from Bridger’s side and was walking his way.

“Name’s Joshua Pilcher,” the tall man said when he stopped beside Bass. “I hear he was on the upper Missouri with Lisa afore Ashley ever come west. When the Spaniard died, Pilcher took over Lisa’s company, and they did well till Immel and Jones got butchered by the Blackfoot in twenty-three. Drips and Fontenelle, even one of them Bent brothers, they all worked for Pilcher one time or other. Some time back I heard talk he offered the English up north he’d trap this side of the mountains for the Hudson’s Bay.”

Glaring at Pilcher, Bass grumbled, “On American territory? That’d make him a traitor to his own country and his own kind!”

“The English turned him down, but a couple years back they made him agent on the upper Missouri for all these Injuns,” the big man declared.

“That what brung him here?” Scratch demanded. “Something to do with the Injuns out here?”

“Naw. Says he’s come here to buy out Bridger and the rest.”

“B-buy ’em out?” Scratch sputtered in surprise. “With whose plews?”

The tall man shrugged. “Sounds like it’s St. Louie French money.”

“Damn if that don’t take the circle.” Turning to stare up into the younger man’s eyes, Titus said, “I see’d your face at many a ronnyvoo, round some fires, over at the trade tents. But I don’t recollect I ever caught your name.”

“Shadrach Sweete,” the man replied. “And you’re Titus Bass.”

“How you know me?”

Sweete chuckled. “Hell, anyone runs with Jim Bridger’s brigade knows who Titus Bass is.”

“But I ain’t never trapped with Gabe.”

“Don’t matter,” Sweete replied. “I recollect how we run across you a time or two through the years. Ain’t that many of us been out here long as me or you have. ’Sides, Gabe thinks the world of you. Why, ever’ time he tells that story of you losing your ha’r, or how you run onto that red nigger years later … whoooeee! Them tales keep the greenhorns from sucking in a breath!”

They laughed together; then Scratch asked, “You figger Fitz got his whiskey kegs open yet?”

“I seen him crack ’em my own self,” Sweete said.

“You think my word be good as plews with Fitz?”

“Damn if it wouldn’t be better’n most.”

Bass slapped the tall man on the back. “Then, what say you, Shadrach—let’s you and me go have us a drink of that saddle varnish these traders claim is whiskey!”

Sweete struck him as a gentle man shoved down inside a grizzly bear’s body. A little taller than Joe Meek, and so wide of shoulder too that Scratch wondered if he could lay a hickory ax handle across that broad beam with no hickory left to hang off at either end.

“Just like you, I come to the mountains myself in twenty-five,” Bass replied as one of the clerks poured out the whiskey into a pair of brand-new tin cups.

“But I bet you wasn’t no fourteen-year-ol’t pup like I was in twenty-five!”

Astonished by that admission, Titus asked, “How the hell you hire on with Gen’l Ashley when you was fourteen?”

“Just lookit me, you cross-eyed idjit!” Sweete bellowed with a disarming smile, standing back to spread his arms. “Even as a pup—I was big for my age!”

“You’re still a goddamned pup!” Titus growled at the man who stood a good half foot taller than he did and nudged something just shy of three hundred pounds.

After a long moment of quiet Sweete sighed. “Where’s the beaver gone, Scratch?”

He looked at the big man, then took another sip of his whiskey. “There’s beaver still, Shad. Up high. Back in a ways where no man’s yet gone. There’s beaver.”

“They say the easy beaver’s been caught,” Sweete agreed. “Ah, shit—we’re on the downside of our trade, what with folks back east wanting silk hats.”

“Beaver’s bound to rise, Shad,” he said with more hope than he felt. “Bound to rise.”

“If it don’t—what the hell’m I gonna do?” the big man asked. “I come to trap beaver when I was fourteen. What the hell’m I s’posed to do when I can’t make a living no more trapping beaver?”

“Let them others get all lathered up, run on back to what you run away from,” Bass said. “They just leave more beaver for niggers like you and me!”

At the sharp ring of the voice they both turned and squinted into the sunlight washing over everything beyond that shady copse of trees. A lone rider galloped up, shouting.

“The Nepercy! They’re fixing to come over with a parade!” the man huffed as the distant sound of drums first reached them. “Gonna show off front of them white women!”

“I’ll bet that’ll be some!” Bass exclaimed, bolting to his feet and swilling down the last of his whiskey before handing the empty tin to Sweete. “Be off to fetch my wife and girl so they can see.”

Zeke was straining at the end of his rope the moment Titus and his horse hoved into sight, yipping and prancing side to side, his big tail whipping mightily at the return of his master.

“You’re gonna have to see this!” Scratch called as he kicked his right leg over and landed on both feet.

He knelt as Magpie lumbered up toward him, clenching a well-moistened strip of dried meat she had been sucking on in one hand. He swept her into his arms and turned to his wife. “C’mon. Get your pony.”

“Where are we going in such a hurry?”

“Bet Magpie’s never see’d the Nepercy strut like prairie cocks. Likely you ain’t either.”

He positioned the girl in front of the saddle before he stuffed a left foot into the stirrup and swung his leg over, settling her onto his lap as he came down into the saddle. “Here,” he said to his daughter, wrapping her tiny hands around the thick látigo leather. “You hol’t on to the reins with me.”

Waits came up beside them, leading her pony. When she had leaped onto its bare back, she asked, “Why are the Pierced Noses making a procession?”

“They want to show off for the white women.”

He watched how that suddenly soured the expression on her face.

“For the white women,” she repeated. “Now the Pierced Noses are gone strange in the head for the white women.”

Titus leaned over and gripped her forearm sympathetically. “Don’t think nothing of it. Just wanted you and Magpie to see the show.”

For a moment Waits gazed at her daughter’s cheerful face, then said, “Yes. Let’s go see the show these Pierced Noses put on for the white women.”

As it turned out, all four tribes eagerly joined in the grand procession as it worked its way toward the site where the missionary women were camped. By the time Scratch and Waits dismounted and tied off their ponies, the front ranks of the march were approaching. Having started their ride at the west end of the valley, the Snake and Bannock passed through the Flathead camp, then the Nez Perce village, sweeping up more and more participants until some four hundred yelling, chanting, shrieking warriors boiled up and down the sides of the parade column.

Stripped as if for the hunt, they wore no more than their breechclout and moccasins, many painted with vivid colors, tying birds and feathers in their hair, wearing the skullcaps of wolves, badgers, even buffalo upon their heads. Shaking lances strewn with the scalp locks taken from vanquished enemies, the horsemen strutted as proudly as any war hero might. Old men rode stately at the center of the march, singing their battle songs as they beat on hand drums or shook buffalo-bladder rattles filled with stream-bottom pebbles. Younger men who had taken no scalps brandished their bows or war clubs or fusils, to which they had tied long strips of red and blue cloth to flutter in the summer breeze.

Within a nearby copse of trees, Captain William Drummond Stewart and Bridger assured Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding that this noisy, bellicose charge was every bit as harmless as the charge made on them by the trappers racing out to meet the caravan. Both wives appeared at the flaps of their tall conical tent sewn of bed ticking and large enough to comfortably sleep all seven of the missionaries. But the moment pale and sickly Eliza Spalding spied the approach of the screaming warriors, she emitted a pained yelp, slapped a hand over her mouth, and turned on her heel—disappearing back into the sanctuary of her tent.

“Curse these godless savages for their nakedness!” the prim and proper one shrieked in horror as she ducked from sight.

But Narcissa Whitman of the twinkling blue eyes and ready smile clapped her hands together with glee before hurrying on her husband’s arm to the edge of the meadow to watch the approach of that cavalcade assembled in honor of the missionaries.

Closer and closer the warriors came, growing noisier, shrieking louder as they drew near until the front ranks spotted the holy man’s fair-haired wife. Like the reflex of a muscle, they put their ponies to the gallop, shouting anew as they raced toward that bed-ticking tent, shaking weapons and feathers, scalps and coup-sticks, tearing out and around, leaping again and again over clumps of gray and green sage, spurts of yellowish dust flaring from every flying hoof. When no more than ten yards away, the first chiefs in the parade suddenly swept to the side without slowing in the slightest, careening their snorting, wide-eyed ponies in a maddening loop that took them entirely around the tall conical tent held fast to the prairie with wooden stakes.

Now more than four hundred warriors raced in a crude oval round and round the campsite as Narcissa laughed and clapped and spun with the excitement and color of it all, made immensely happy at this exhibition in her honor. At first a few warriors, then more, reined up in a spray of dust and dismounted, walking their ponies over to examine the Dearborn carriage the missionaries had succeeded in bringing all the way from the States. Outside and in they inspected it, some even crawling in the grass beneath the carriage to get themselves a complete study of it. Others rubbed the top, dragged their fingers across the soft leather-covered horsehair-stuffed seats, or repeatedly picked up and dropped, picked up and dropped the double-tree that harnessed the carriage to a single horse.

“Waits-by-the-Water!”

They both turned to find Narcissa and her husband approaching with quite a crowd in tow. The doctor’s wife called out the Crow woman’s name again just as they came to a halt before the trapper.

“Please tell your wife it is so good to see her again,” Narcissa exclaimed. “I was hoping to before we depart for Oregon country.”

Bass translated and Waits nodded self-consciously.

“Mr. Bass,” Marcus Whitman began, “my wife and I would like to invite you and your family to have dinner with us tomorrow evening. If that isn’t convenient, we’ll make it the night after.”

“No, ’morrow evening will set just fine by us, Doctor.”

“Good,” and Whitman smiled genuinely. “Tomorrow it is.”

Narcissa took a step forward, reaching up to touch Magpie’s bare foot as she sat on her father’s shoulders. Then she took up Waits-by-the-Water’s hand and squeezed it, smiling with her whole face. Together she and her husband turned and moved once more into the crowd that inched its way back to that conical tent of blue-striped bed ticking.

“Tomorrow,” Waits repeated after they had started back for their ponies.

“Won’t it be fun for you and Magpie too?”

“Yes,” she answered in English, then turned to face him fully after he lifted Magpie from his shoulders and set her atop his saddle.

Waits-by-the-Water took his empty hand and caressed the fingers gently, looking into his eyes as she said, “It will be a good night to celebrate our happy news.”

“What happy news?”

She laid his hand on her belly, pressing it there as she had done once before. “Ti-tuzz … you are going to be a father again.”