Ride the Moon Down

22

Times were in the past year he had reckoned on just what Bridger did with that heavy suit of armor the Scotsman gave him. Wondered what would have happened when all that foofaraw got too heavy to pack around in Blackfoot country, just where Gabe would have abandoned the damned thing. Bass didn’t think Jim would have cached it. A whole damned suit of old armor wasn’t the sort of plunder a man figured on coming back for any day soon.

Back when that rendezvous of 1837 broke up, company partisans Andrew Drips and Lucien Fontenelle elected to swap places. That summer while Drips accompanied the fur caravan back to St. Louis, the volatile Fontenelle commanded a brigade in the field. With Bridger as his pilot, they set out for the Blackfoot country of the upper Missouri with one hundred ten trappers and camp keepers. Osborne Russell and Doc Newell joined a smaller outfit that headed northeast for the valleys of the Powder and the Tongue—some of their favorite country.

Every summer when the pack train arrived, those men who had fled from a life back east nonetheless clamored around the caravan pilot, eager to learn if they were to receive any mail from family or friends so far away in the States. If the booshway didn’t have any mail for a fella, then he could usually get his hands on one of the public papers of the day, packed in thick bundles and transported halfway across the continent to men who could barely read but were nonetheless ravenous for any news of home. At rendezvous a man who could read was damn near reading all the time: ciphering letters written to those who could not understand the strange marks on the paper, or relating stories from those newspapers that recorded long-ago events in faraway places.

But the heady days of these raucous midsummer fairs were breathing their last.

In those last few days before Bridger steered his brigade north, Scratch purchased a dozen of the small iron fishhooks the traders offered, then went onto the prairie with Shad Sweete in search of grasshoppers. The two of them ended up having almost as much fun catching the hoppers as they had using those insects for bait on the hooks they dipped in the Green River and Horse Creek. On lazy afternoons they fished and sipped some Monongahela rum, a rare treat in the mountains, sweetened with a heaping spoon of brown sugar stirred into each cup.

“I can’t recollect ever fishing since I was a young’un,” Scratch admitted.

“Where was that?”

“Caintuck, right on the Ohio.”

Sweete said, “I figger it’s just like riding a horse. You fall off, but you don’t ever forget how to crawl back on.”

At times the two of them gathered a small crowd of curious Indians and trappers who collected on the shady banks to watch their amusing efforts. More often than not the small native trout and grayling weren’t shy about taking the wriggling bait that floated on the surface of the water. It never failed to surprise Titus when a sharp tug pulled on that twine he had knotted at the end of a peeled willow branch.

Eating the tiny fish was a different matter altogether. What with all the little bones, he soon decided it was far more work than was worth the effort. Antelope or elk or buffalo it would be from here on out. Just as long as the fish didn’t ever get greedy and start eating beaver, Scratch figured he would leave those fish in peace.

By late fall, after trapping his way through the Wind River Mountains and up the Bighorn, he had his family back on the Yellowstone and in the heart of Crow country. The weather had grown cold early that autumn, then moderated as the days sailed past. Instead of turning west, where he believed he might run onto Yellow Belly’s village, he started east for the Rosebud and the Tongue. Since winter appeared slow in arriving, Titus decided he could steal a final few weeks of trapping out of the season, working their way toward Fort Van Buren before they had to turn west, searching for the Crow in their winter camp.

Even though the water in the kettles lay covered by a thin ice slick every morning, the sun always rose, warming the earth blanketed by autumn-dried grasses, lacy collars of old, dirty snow strangling every bush or tree trunk. Along the Tongue the beaver were starting to put on a heavier coat, that protective felt nestled below the long guard hairs growing all the thicker. As the days passed, Scratch read the sign plain for any man who took a notion to pay heed.

A hard winter was due.

So when the faraway horizon threatened many days later, Scratch quickly hurried back to camp where he loaded their plews and possessions on Samantha and their horses, then lit out for Tullock’s post. They might well have as much as a day. From the looks of that gray-blue skyline rearing its ugly head out of the north, they should have enough time for the journey before the storm clobbered them. Down, down the Tongue they hurried, their noses pointed for the Yellowstone, riding straight into the teeth of the coming fury as the wind began to quarter around, carrying with it that distinct metallic tang of a high plains blizzard.

Reluctantly he agreed to stop that night short of their goal. Lighting a fire, Bass figured to give his family and the animals a few hours’ rest before sunup. But Scratch had them moving again before night had been completely sucked out of the dawn sky.

By the middle of that second morning the storm’s first sullen tantrum was taunting them. Snowflakes sharp as iron arrowheads slashed this way and that at their bare cheeks as they rode hunched over, head-tucked into the softly keening wind.

“How far, popo?” Magpie asked, her tiny voice muffled against his chest where he had the girl wrapped beneath the buffalo robe covering them both as the horses plodded forward one slow step at a time, icy heads bent against the mighty gale.

Each time he blinked, his eyes cried out in pain—the wind-driven shards slashing across them. By now his eyelashes were little more than heavy crusts of ice he struggled to keep open. Scratch figured there was no sense in telling Magpie the truth. Better to tell his daughter what she needed to hear then and there.

“I think I see some familiar hills ahead,” he lied in Crow. Truth was, he couldn’t see much past the end of his pony’s nose.

Worried suddenly about Waits-by-the-Water, Bass twisted in the saddle. The gusty wind almost tore the coyote-hide cap from his head.

Back there a matter of yards from his pony’s tail root, Titus thought he saw the movement of her shadow, barely making out Samantha’s dark outline plodding flank to flank beside his wife’s pony. The moment the wind had first come up that morning, he had knotted a rope to both of those saddles, looping the other ends beneath his left leg before he knotted them around the large pommel the size and shape of a Spanish orange at the front of his Santa Fe saddle. He had strung the rest of the pack animals out behind the mule, connecting each one to another animal in front and another in back with more rope. Since starting in that frozen predawn darkness, Bass had brooded that the storm might well cut the strong animals from the weak.

Because one or more of the ponies might break free and turn about with the force of the wind, he had packed what they needed to survive on Samantha. The rest he could go in search of after the storm’s fury had played itself out. But the mule carried what might well save their lives even if all else were taken from them.

“My mother, she is near?” Magpie asked.

He figured she became frightened when he turned to look behind him.

“She’s with us, daughter,” he reassured her, his teeth chattering like bone dominoes in that horn cup Hames Kingsbury loved to rattle while floating down the river.

He wondered if Kingsbury was an old man now. If not—where he was buried. Perhaps even put to rest in the Mississippi the way they had consigned Ebenezer Zane’s body to the river back in 1810. Or maybe on that thieves’ road known as the Natchez Trace. Would any of the others still be alive …

Dragging the ice-crusted wool blanket mitten across his eyes, then under his red, swollen nose, his raw, chapped, ice-battered skin shrieked in torment. Suddenly Titus held his breath, put his nose back into the wind, and breathed deep.

Wood smoke.

By damn, it was wood smoke.

That meant a fire. And where he would find a fire, there must be humankind. Somewhere he could get out of the storm and warm up his nearly frozen wife and children. A lodge, even a windbreak …

“You smell that?”

After a moment his daughter asked, “Smell only you in here against your heart.”

“Magpie,” his voice cracked, “I smell wood smoke.”

“A f-fire, popo?”

“Yes—a fire.” He spoke it like a promise. “You’ll be warm soon.”

His mind racing, Scratch sorted through the possibilities the way he would sort through his pelts: thinking of the worst that could happen, pushing that aside to cling to the best. At the very least he knew that with this wind blowing into his face, that fire had to be due north of them. A blind man could stumble across it now. Even if it were nothing but some hunter who found himself caught out in the storm and quickly erected a crude windbreak, such a shelter would be more than the four of them had right then anyway.

Too—he considered—a praying man might beg God that they would find a fire glowing inside a Crow lodge where they could huddle out of the wind while the storm exhausted itself just beyond their sanctuary of poles and buffalo hides. But then he admitted that Titus Bass never had been the sort to get down on his prayer bones and taffy up to the Lord the way his mam had tried to teach her young’uns to do.

But at times like these when a man simply could do no more on his own to protect those he loved, when it was simply beyond his own power … then he supposed it wouldn’t hurt to see if the All-Maker was listening. Just as long as the four of them made it to shelter and lived out the storm, as long as this storm didn’t take his wife, or his daughter, or that little baby boy, Bass promised he would do anything in return. All God had to do was show him what was expected.

A man what didn’t spend much of his time listening to anything the Almighty had to say wasn’t the sort of man who could easily read the All-Maker’s sign. Not like Asa McAfferty—now, that was a fella who could cipher the Lord’s word plain as sun. But someone like Titus Bass might well be hard-pressed to figure out when God was talking to him, or even what tongue the Everywhere Spirit chose to speak in.

Nonetheless, if God saw his family through, Bass vowed he would do his best to be attentive to what God might ask in return, where- or whenever.

As strong as the fragrant tang of wood smoke grew in his sore, drippy nostrils, Scratch believed they had to be getting close. Step by step, stronger and stronger.

At times it became difficult to keep the bank of the Tongue close by on their right, what with the way the trees and willow forced them to ride several yards from the riverbank, sweeping slowly this way and that as they needled their way through the underbrush. The pack ponies began to protest now, pulling back on Samantha—making her bray in distress or anger at the way they were attempting to turn about and flee in the face of the brutal wind. For a moment he stopped, just long enough to loop the mule’s rope twice around his left wrist, clutching Magpie against him with his right arm, the pony’s reins held short and tight in that right hand as he struggled to get the horse started again into the teeth of the storm.

Out of the swirling gray gloom leaped the flickering glow of the fire, a corona of yellow glittering in the midst of the wavering, white-diamond air as snowflakes darted about in wispy, wind-driven trails. As they approached, Titus could tell that the fire had been huge not so long ago, nearly a bonfire fed by huge trunks and limbs of downfall someone had dragged to this small riverbank clearing. But now the man-high inferno had whipped itself so furiously that the firewood was nearly exhausted and on the verge of dying.

No one here to attend it. Like a beacon lit, then abandoned.

For barely a moment as he halted the exhausted pony again, Titus spotted two meat-drying racks erected back against the cottonwoods … then the blackened crowns of those small rocks arranged in a crude fire-ring where a lodge might once have stood. Injuns.

Should he stop here—get the three of them down by that fire—then push on by himself into the teeth of the storm?

There on the far side of the fire, that wall of ten-foot willow offered the only windbreak he could see in the fury of wind and snow. Right where those who had abandoned this place had raised their lodge. Perhaps Waits could huddle with the children beneath the three robes he could drape over them, waiting there for his return as the snow continued to build.

When he kicked the pony in the flanks, the animal failed to move. It shuddered the next time he kicked it with the heels of his ice-crusted buffalo-fur moccasins. A third hammer to its ribs finally got the animal lunging away a hoof at a time, slowly stepping around the perimeter of that dying fire, flames wildly licking up the huge logs, sparks spewing from the rotted wood like muzzle blasts, quickly swallowed by the wind, extinguished by the cold like galaxies of dying fireflies—given life in one breath, gone with the next.

On the far side of the fire, upwind, he tugged back on the reins and twisted stiffly in the saddle, his left arm wooden as he raised Samantha’s rope, clumsily trying to find the pony’s lead rope he had looped beneath his belt.

As the wind battered the side of his face, Scratch searched and dug at the side of his elk-hide coat. His cold mind slowly grasped the horror: the pony’s rope was gone! It had somehow disappeared, dragged from his belt without his realizing it—

“W-waits!” he cried hoarsely in English. Even as the word escaped his lips, it was swept away by the gale, swallowed by the keening wind.

“Popo?”

Swallowing hard, he whispered to his daughter, “I’m calling your mother.”

“Is mother there?”

“Y-yes,” he lied again, feeling his eyes pool.

“And little brother?”

“Yes, Magpie.”

God, I told you I would do anything you asked. Spare them. And if you must take any of us, then see they live and you can take me.

Her voice drenched in anguish, the girl whimpered, “I want my mother.”

“Hush, now, Magpie,” he scolded her sharply, angry and bitter at himself as much as he was angry and bitter with the All-Maker. “There’s a fire here where I can get you warm.”

“And my mother too.”

“Yes, daughter—”

“Ti-tuzz!”

Her raspy voice slipped through a lull in the wind a frozen heartbeat before her shadowy, ghostly form loomed out of the blizzard.

“Woman!”

“Ti-tuzz!”

Bending his head down, Bass reassured his daughter, “Your m-mother is here.”

She was sobbing against his breast. “Now you can get all of us warm.”

“Yes,” he gasped as he turned the pony around, watching the black form inch closer. “Now I promise to warm all of you.”

He dropped the mule’s lead rope and held out his left arm, so crusted it felt as if he had been lifting a thick stump of cottonwood. She brought her pony to a halt at his left side, leaning against him beneath that arm, sobbing.

“I thought I’d lost you in the storm,” he said, rubbing that flap of the buffalo robe where her head was buried in the crusted fur. Then he heard the faint whimper of the baby.

“The boy, he is cold. I know he is scared too,” she pleaded as she drew back the fur and tried to gaze up at his face in the storm.

“There is a fire where you and the children can stay while I go in search of shelter. You will be safe here till I can come back for—”

“We will be safe with you.”

“The animals are tired,” he begged her. “Better that I go on alone. I don’t want to lose any of you to the cold and wind.”

She interrupted, “Bu’a, out there minutes ago, I knew we would not die. My heart knew to believe in you. We will go with you.”

Instantly his heart rose to his throat. “No. You must do as I say. Trust me and stay here. I will be back—”

That’s when he dimly realized he was still smelling the wood smoke.

Bass immediately twisted in the saddle, away from his wife, turning his face into the wind once more—sniffing the terrible, metallic teeth of the fury heavy with moisture. Water. Nothing but a dry winter storm that had just crossed a wide river on these high, desertlike plains could smell quite like that.

Yet how was it that the beckoning fragrance of that wood smoke remained strong in his nostrils now that he stood upwind of this abandoned fire?

There had to be another fire to the north. Close to the Yellowstone that relinquished its wind-whipped froth to the storm.

“Come!” he cried. “Stay beside me. And talk to Flea! Keep talking to him so I can hear your voice and know your pony is staying near mine.”

Harder than ever now, he struggled to get the animals moving, horses that acted as if they were no longer ready to bolt from the teeth of the storm, but had decided they were giving up the fight and would die there. Yelling, lashing out with his icy moccasin, he goaded Waits’s pony and his own into lunging, uncertain steps as the white veil grew thicker around them, the wind no longer keening like a bitter, disembodied widow.

Now it howled in anger, sang out in a shrill fury.

At times over the next half hour, which seemed to be an eternity, the wood smoke grew stronger for a few moments, then disappeared altogether—only to return on the back of the wind just when Bass became convinced he had wandered off the path, or had passed the fire by. All through those next anxious minutes his mind tugged at it the way the current of the powerful Platte had tugged at his two horses, eventually claiming one—moving blind into the whiteout.

Suddenly he realized they had stepped off the shallow riverbank, their horses lunging into the Yellowstone. Icy water surged against their legs, washing against their bellies and ribs, swirling around his own left leg, spray and drops freezing instantly as the animals snorted in fear, whinnied in fear—plunging headlong for the north bank without a shred of hesitation. Only blind terror.

Waits cried out, a shrill yelp she stifled as her pony sidestepped there in the middle of the river where it found a deep pocket and swam back out, continuing to battle the current from the west and that blizzard born out of the north.

Stronger and stronger still the odor grew, then disappeared as the blizzard twisted this way and that—

Just as his horse’s front legs floundered and he sensed it was going down, Bass heaved back on Magpie with that left arm as she started to slip away from him, onto the animal’s withers. But with the next step the horse rocked back and shuddered, its front legs clawing—seizing ground, lunging onto the north bank with the last of its strength!

Out of the ghostly curtain emerged the dark shadow of the low, hulking block of neatly stacked timbers. He was almost upon the wall when it appeared right before them.

A few more steps and he stopped. Reached out and touched the chinked timbers with his crusted mitten.

“Halloo!” he croaked, barely audible as his cracked lips split even more painfully.

There against the wall, for the moment, they were out of the worst of the wind. He cried again, louder now, “Hal-halloo!”

It had to be Tullock’s post.

Bass reached over and tugged on the other pony’s rope now, getting their horses started again there in the lee of the log wall.

Fort Van Buren. Mouth of the Tongue. North bank of the Yellowstone.

“Halloo! Tullock!”

They reached the end of the wall, where the dark shadow of the timbers disappeared in the blizzard as the wind screeched itself around the low log structure.

“Tullock!” and the wind carried his cry away again—

“Who? Who goes there?”

Titus swallowed, ready to cry as he glanced over at his wife, squeezed his daughter tighter.

“B-bass!” he whimpered into the might of the storm. “Titus Bass!”

“Titus Bass?” the disembodied voice came to him around the corner of those timbers.

The ghost figure suddenly took shape. “I ain’t see’d your hide for longer’n I can count!”

“Tullock?”

“No!” and the tall, rail-thin figure stepped right around the corner of the post, stopping at Scratch’s knee to peer up at the frozen man from the hood of his capote. “It’s Levi, Scratch! Levi Gamble!”

The two tiny rooms that made up Fort Van Buren were gloomy with the blizzard’s blotting out the sun. Little light but for the four smoky oil lamps, a pair of flickering candle lanterns, along with that stone fireplace where two Indian women and a half-dozen children sat basking in the warmth.

Gamble shooed them back, clucking in Assiniboine, clearing a path through them as he ushered Waits-by-the-Water from the creaky door and had her settle right in the middle of the hearth where she dragged the crusted buffalo robe from her shoulders as the ice adhering to it began to sweat and dribble to the hardpacked floor. She bent her head, kissing the boy’s face, wiping her tears from his cheeks.

“I’ll see to this’un, Titus Bass,” Samuel Tullock offered with a kindly growl, kneeling and putting his arms out to accept the young girl as she emerged stiff and frightened from the buffalo robe and elk-hide coat Scratch had clutched around them both.

“I … I thankee,” Bass whispered, his throat clogged with appreciation—to Gamble, to Tullock. To God. “I truly do.”

Then he turned back to the door with Levi.

Outside the two of them stumbled after the animals already drifting before the wind that hurtled the men around like wood chips on a mountain stream. Lunging after the mule’s lead rope, Scratch managed to yank Samantha back toward the cabin.

The other ponies reluctantly turned when she did, following her as they would a bell-mare, while Gamble hollered and slapped and cajoled them from the rear as they busted through the snowdrifts already accumulating waist high at the corner of the fort. It was there the wind whipped and eddied. There along the south wall they tied the ropes off to iron swivel rings pounded waist high into the unpeeled logs.

For a long moment Bass stood there, shading his eyes from the wind and frozen snow with a mittened hand, staring at the ice caked on their legs, around their bellies. Howling snow and crossing that damned river—

“Ain’t nothing more you can do now!” Levi yelled above the deafening wail of the wind as it careened around the corner of the wall with a constant white slash.

For a moment Bass stood there, looking at all of them, the way the ice crusted their eyes, forelocks, and manes, how wind-scoured ridges of it lay gathered against the packs and even across the broad flanks all the way down to the tail roots.

Then he said, “If they’re meant to make it—they’ll be here when the storm’s passed.”

“C’mon,” Gamble urged. “Get on inside with your family.”

Some of the drifts were already tall enough that the deep snow billowed out the long tails of his coat, his legs busting through until he stood crotch-deep in the shocking cold, snow seeping down inside his breechclout and leggings. They had to kick with their toes, dig with their heels, at the thick, icy crust forming at the foot of the doorway. Eventually the two of them together were able to pry the door back toward them far enough to allow them to slip through sideways, then drag it closed against the square-hewn jamb.

Both Gamble and Bass sank to the floor, gasping, pummeled by the wind, worn down with the subzero cold, suddenly back inside where a man could hear his own heartbeat again, could hear the crackle of burning wood in that fireplace. Where a man felt relief at finding himself still alive.

Scratch’s face started to hurt as his breathing began to slow. He dragged off the coyote cap and that long strip of blanket he had tied around his head and over his ears, working at the frozen, crusted knot under his chin. Across the room at the fire, Waits-by-the-Water nursed little Flea in the flickering glow of that fireplace as she talked in low tones with the women. A young half-breed girl sat with Magpie, a pair of dolls between them.

Titus gazed into his wife’s face—her eyes saying that her faith in him had not been misplaced. As he worried the big antler buttons from their holes and pulled the flaps of his coat aside, his daughter looked over, stood, and started his way.

“Popo,” she said as clear as she ever had, coming into his arms.

As Magpie laid her cheek against her father’s chest, Titus sighed. “That’s a second time you’ve took my family in from a winter storm, Levi. How’s a man s’pose to repay you for kindness like that?”

“I’ll figger something out,” he gasped with a weary smile.

“We damn near thought you was the wind,” the trader said as he came over to the two of them with a long-necked clay bottle in hand. “Till Levi claimed it weren’t the wind calling my name out there.”

Bass gazed at Gamble. “I’d found the fort a’ready, by damn, Levi—no sense you coming out in that storm to fetch me.”

“Like your ass weren’t half-froze to the saddle as it was, Titus Bass,” Gamble said, reaching up to take the bottle from Tullock as the trader squatted between them, shoulder to shoulder. He sniffed, smiled, and tilted his head back as he drank long and slow with eyes closed. Levi licked his lips when he passed the bottle on past the trader to Bass.

“You’ll like it,” Tullock declared.

“That there’s good company rum, Sam’l,” Gamble observed. “Not the sort I’m used to drinking up at Union.”

“It ain’t for the trade,” Tullock explained. “This here what’s made for the factors.”

“That’s some fine rum, mighty fine,” Scratch said as he wiped the back of his hand across his lips and mustache. “Don’t much care where it come from, Sam’l—long as it warms up that cold man inside me.”

“If that stuff don’t warm you up, then the nigger inside you is awready dead!” Tullock swore.

After he took a second slow swallow, Bass handed the bottle to Tullock, licked the droplets on the ends of his mustache, and asked, “What brings you down here this season, Levi?”

Gamble tore his eyes away and glanced at Tullock. The trader nodded, placed the clay bottle on the floor between Levi and Titus, then stood and moved off toward some crates in the corner as if he were going to busy himself elsewhere.

When Gamble finally looked back at Bass, Scratch already had a cold rock of something resting at the bottom of his belly.

“I been down here going on two weeks already, Titus.”

Scratch was afraid it had nothing to do with good news when he asked, “Little late in the season for you to be bringing trade goods upriver from Fort Union, ain’t it?”

Tullock still had his back turned when he said, “I ain’t gonna get no trade goods this year.”

For a long moment he studied Gamble’s face. “S’pose you tell me what you’re doing down here, Levi. You didn’t go and kill nobody, did you? Didn’t go and get yourself in trouble with your booshways?”

Gamble stared at his knees, then answered. “It don’t have nothing to do with any of that.”

Suddenly Tullock wheeled and blurted, “They got smallpox on the river! Smallpox.” And as suddenly he turned on his heel and disappeared into the darkness of a small adjoining room.

Stunned silent, Titus watched the white-faced trader go, then looked at Gamble. “Sm-smallpox?”

Levi nodded. “Come upriver on the summer boat, St. Peter’s.”

Bass quickly glanced at Waits, at the boy suckling at his mother’s breast. Staring in turn at those other women and children as the fear climbed out of the pit of him. “Y-you ain’t … ain’t got no smallpox in you—”

“No,” Levi interrupted, laying a hand on Bass’s forearm a moment. “But I did have me a terrible fight with it.”

“Fight?”

With a struggle Gamble rose, moved off a couple of steps, and brought back an oil lamp where a smoky wick burned in rendered bear grease. Bringing the flickering light near his face, Levi knelt in front of Scratch. “You see what it done to me?”

Gamble’s face, the shape of that nose and those eyes, they remained unchanged. But the cheeks and the forehead were deeply scarred, pitted with the ravages of the scourge.

“I ain’t never knowed no one had the pox,” Bass admitted quietly, awed by his fear.

“Pray God you never do, Titus,” he said, putting the lamp aside and settling back against the wall, sweeping up the clay bottle to throw down another drink.

Scratch stared through the dim, flickering light provided by the lamps and that fireplace, gazing at the Indian women, at the children. “Your wife, your young’uns—they get it just like you?”

“Neither of them my wife,” Gamble admitted sullenly. “They be Tullock’s woman and her relations. They was awready here ahead of me when I come in. Don’t you worry: they ain’t got no smallpox. Be down with it awready, but they ain’t—”

“So wh-where’s your family, Levi—”

“Gone. All gone.”

“The pox?”

Gamble nodded and finally looked at Bass, handing Titus the clay bottle. “Here, drink up with me, ’cause it don’t help no man to drink alone.”

Wondering what he could say, suddenly made to think of other men like Asa McAfferty and Joe Meek, men who had had their women killed, had their hearts ripped right out of their chests … Scratch took the bottle from him. “No man’s ever gonna have to drink alone when his heart’s been broke.”

Levi stared at the floor. “Titus, there’s a hole inside me what I don’t think I can fill with all the rum in the world.”

“How … how’d the pox come up here?”

“They said one of the men on the boat. He come down with it, and they didn’t turn back because they had just so much time to bring trade goods upriver, had furs to take down to St. Louis. Brung the pox to Fort Clark. The boat brung it on up to Fort Union.”

“Your woman … how many others?”

“More’n anyone can count,” Levi whispered like a death knell. “Before fall come, it destroyed the Mandan down at Fort Clark, the Arikaree too. Ain’t any of ’em left we heard of.”

“The Ree too?” Bass thought on the people of that rattle shaker Asa McAfferty had killed many a winter ago.

“When the boat reached Fort Union, they quickly unloaded the goods bound upriver for Fort McKenzie, then loaded ’em on the keel and pushed on up the Missouri.”

Bass shuddered. “You telling me they took the pox into Blackfoot country?”

Gamble nodded. “Word coming downriver says Culbertson tried to warn them Blackfeets away from Fort McKenzie—but the niggers was suspicious the company was stealing powder and lead from ’em. Powder and lead they needed to make war.”

“War on the Crow and Flathead. War on the white men,” Bass said quietly. He looked into the thin man’s sallow, gray face—recognized the torment there. “Hard to believe. Your wife … and all your young’uns.”

Gamble only nodded silently.

“How’s a man … make sense of that, Levi? Watching your family get took by the pox? Get took by something you can’t fight?”

“The day after the boat come, a few of us went out to tell the villages in the area not to come in, warning ’em something terrible would happen to ’em if they did. But a few days after we told ’em not to come in to trade, some young bucks rode on in to steal some horses. Halsey—the new booshway up there—he put up a reward for those horses. One of the men who was ’bout to come down sick went out to catch them horse thieves.”

Titus watched Tullock trudge back into the light, another clay bottle clutched in one hand as the trader grumbled, “’Stead of the pox staying there at the fort, that ignorant bastard give it to the horse thieves—and them young bucks took it back to their village.”

Bass wagged his head. “But that wasn’t how your woman, your children, got took.”

“First one to come down with it was Halsey hisself,” Levi declared, courage in his voice. “One of the other booshways claimed he knowed how they could ’noculate everyone else from Halsey’s sores. So we done that, all of us—hunters, interpreters, coopers—all of us … and our families too. A simple thing: make a small cut in our skin and rub a little of Halsey’s pus in that bloody cut. They told us it was gonna keep us all alive.”

What did you say to a man who had watched his wife and children come down with the raging fever, the boils that erupted into pustules, unable to save even himself from the disease—forced to watch as all those he loved were ripped from him, while he somehow survived.

Titus asked, “How … how come you … you—”

“Lived?” Levi finished the question. Then shook his head. “Ain’t none of us can answer that. Maybeso the white man got a stronger constitution, Titus. Most of the whites come down with it lived. And near ever’ one of the Injuns what got the pox … they’re gone.”

Settling to the floor nearby, a grim-lipped Tullock set that second clay bottle between the three of them.

“So now the company’s give the pox to the Blackfoot,” Scratch repeated the ominous news as if to make some sense of its unreality. Then suddenly it struck him at the pit of his belly where that cold stone still lay. “What about the Crow?”

“So far as we know,” the trader said as he leaned back against a bundle of robes, “the pox ain’t come no farther up the Yellowstone.”

“F-far as you know?”

Both of them nodded. “None of the Crow been in to trade with me since late summer—’bout the time I heard first rumors of it up at Fort Union. I was on my way north to find out why the boat didn’t come down with my year’s goods.”

“No Crow?” Scratch echoed, hopeful. “Maybeso they heard and they’re staying away.”

“Can’t count on that, Titus. Someone’s gotta tell ’em,” Levi advised. “That’s what me and Sam’l been trying to sort through last few days. Where to find ’em—how to tell ’em to stay away.”

“And someone’s gotta tell ’em to stay away from the Blackfoot,” Scratch declared solemnly. “Can’t go make war on them what’s got the pox.”

He watched both Tullock and Gamble nod as they glanced at one another.

Levi turned back to gaze at Bass. “We figger you’re the one, Titus.”

“The one for what?”

Gamble sighed. “Go tell the Crow the white man’s brought sure death to the mountains.”