Wind Walker

FOUR

“You figger I’ll ever use this arm again?”

When Shad Sweete asked that of him, Titus Bass was stunned. He turned to gaze at his friend standing in the shadows of the tall adobe wall at old Fort Vasquez. “What makes you think you won’t be back to wrasslin’ bears and whoopin’ Injuns real soon, Shadrach?”

“It’s been a long time,” he said with a heavy resignation. “Too long.”

“Who’re you to say it’s been too long?”

Sweete shrugged.

So Bass took a step closer to the tall man and asked, “What’s Shell Woman tell you? She ain’t said it’s time to take that sling off.”

“No, she says I ain’t ready for that … not yet.”

“C’mere, Shadrach,” he prodded, gesturing for the big man to walk with him to the center of the plaza at the middle of this small adobe trading post.

Near the western wall Waits-by-the-Water was giving Shell Woman a tour of this once-thriving fur post where Titus and his family had spent the better part of a winter years gone now.^* Doing her best to explain this and that to Shell Woman by sign, pointing, and impromptu gestures, she was entertaining the five children to give the two men some time to themselves there in the deteriorating hulk of this fort, unoccupied almost five years now. Before it had been abandoned, Andrew Sublette and Louis Vasquez gave it their all in the Arapaho trade here on a wide, grassy flat along the east bank above the South Platte. It was here, Shad had explained to his wife as they approached the deteriorating mud walls, that he had worked a few seasons for the partners after the summer rendezvous were no more. Here stood a part of his past, a piece of his life before he first came among Gray Thunder’s band and took a shine to a pretty, doe-eyed girl.

Even though the partners had raised their post more than two hundred miles north of Fort William down on the Arkansas River, the influence of the Bent brothers ranged far and wide along the Front Range of these southern Rocky Mountains. Within two trapping seasons, the Bents and Milton Sublette’s own older brother, William, had consolidated the lion’s share of the Indian trade, not to mention what few men still trapped on their own instead of slaving for the overbloated American Fur Company. While Andrew ended up throwing in with his older brother’s economic fortunes, Vasquez had ridden north and eventually formed a partnership with Jim Bridger—the two of them constructing their first small post on Black’s Fork of the Green River by early autumn in ’43.

“Look ’round you, Shadrach,” Titus suggested. “Look at ever’thing around you here.”

“Ain’t nothing left,” Sweete grumped. “Nothing to look at—”

“That’s where you’re wrong, my friend.”

Sweete looked down at him strangely, as one might regard a soft-brained town idiot. “Ain’t nothing to see here but mud walls and them broke-down wood gates, a few corral posts, an’ what’s left of the fur press that ain’t been burned to ash by the Injuns.”

Wagging his head, Bass said, “You ain’t lookin’ close enough.”

“At what?”

“Lookin’ at all the shinin’ times you had here,” he whispered, a mystical enthusiasm rising in his voice. “Take a look over there,” he said as he turned Sweete on his heel. “An’ over there too. You was here for times that was some, Shadrach! Times got tough an’ I won’t argue with you that this place is drying up like a ol’ buffler wallow … but it sure as blazes shined while you was here.”

Titus stood looking up at his tall friend’s face, watching something new come into Sweete’s eyes as the big man studied the mud walls, the charred, half-burned gate barely suspended from its iron hardware at the entrance, at those empty, lifeless windows along the walls of the low-roofed huts appearing very much like the empty eye sockets of a buffalo skull … and realized Shadrach was finally seeing more than the abandoned facade. His eyes were finally looking back across the years to a day when this spot teemed with life. A long-ago day when he stood tall and bold against what the future might throw at him. Back to a day before their breed was abandoned and they were all left to wander evermore.

“You see what Shad Sweete was when he stood here many seasons ago?”

He nodded slowly. Then turned his head to look down at his older friend. “I can see more’n some empty post ever’body turned their backs on.”

“Can you see what you was meant to do, meant to be, when they pulled the fur business out from under us?”

Shad went back to staring at the walls. “No, Scratch. I can’t see that.”

“Good.” He slapped Sweete on the back. “None of us can see ahead into what days’re still to come. We’ll leave that up to them ol’ rattle-shakers and Injun medeecin men. Now, lookee right over there.”

“At them women?”

“Shell Woman. Hell yes, you idjit,” he snorted. “Lookee there at that young pup o’ your’n holding on to his mam’s hand so tight, at that li’l girl Shell Woman’s got in her arms.”

“I see ’em.”

“That’s all the gonna-be you need to worry about, Shadrach. Don’t go frettin’ on what was—”

“But … my goddamned arm!”

“You’re the only one worried ’bout it. Shell Woman sure as hell ain’t.”

“It’s my arm,” he groaned. “If’n I can’t take care of that family over there—”

“You been doin’ fine by ’em ever since that wolf chewed you up and spit you back out!”

Sweete’s eyes narrowed menacingly. “I can’t wait till I’m strong ’nough again to toss you in the river.”

“The Platte over there?”

“Yeah—I’ll throw your ol’ ass in the Platte.”

“Just be gentle with me, child,” Titus pleaded, his hands clasped together prayerfully. “Promise me you won’t do it till summer.”

Looking down at that left arm bound close to his chest in a sling fashioned from a huge black bandanna of silk, Shadrach sounded wistful. “Hope by summer, I can toss us both in the river.”

Overhead a ragged V of Canada geese curled low, making their noisy descent on the nearby river. In silence both men watched those final moments of flight as the birds ceased flapping, raised their wings into double arches all the better to catch the wind, and dropped their legs beneath them as they descended onto the South Platte, squawking with a flourish and a spray of water.

Sweete said, “First of them I’ve see’d this year.”

“Honkers making their way north, Shadrach. Day at a time,” Titus said. “Just like us: a day at a time.”

That snowy, hoary night back south along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, Scratch had convinced himself that no one was going to stop Shad’s relentless bleeding. But old as he was, despite all that he’d seen out here in these wild and mysterious places—Titus Bass was in for an experience he never could have imagined he would witness right before his eyes, especially back in those days when he was young and far too cynical to believe in anything beyond the reach of his own hands. Had that night happened to a younger Titus, why—he likely would have refused to accept what he had seen, and passed it off as nothing more than his mind playing hoo-doo tricks on him with some strange and inexplicable occurrence. As it was, Scratch had witnessed something that rocked him down to the soles of his winter moccasins, then did his damnedest to wrap his mind around what marvel had overtaken all of them. By dawn he had come to accept that there was no other explanation but that they had all been in the presence of Shell Woman’s protector spirits.

Bringing back their horses from the coulee, Titus had somehow managed to clumsily get Shadrach off the ground and into the saddle, weak and groggy as Sweete had become. With that small, lone pouch of buffalo tongue and boss meat lashed between the sawbucks on the packhorse, Bass had clambered aboard his mount and taken a moment longer to wrap a big bandanna over the coyote fur cap, knotting it beneath his bearded chin to hold the cap down against the growing strength of the icy gales. Then he had closed his eyes. Drawing in a deep breath, he dithered on whither direction they should go. With the disappearance of the sun behind the storm clouds, gone were the landmarks that had brought them here to the buffalo. Nowhere to be seen were the guiding stars he had always relied upon at times like these.

“You know where we’re going?” Shadrach had asked him weakly sometime later after they had quartered into the storm’s wintry fury.

Bass had stopped all three horses and pulled the big wool muffler down to his chin. “You got a feelin’ I’m going wrong?”

Sweete shook his head. “I … I dunno. Just take me to Shell Woman, quickest way you can, Titus. Quickest you can.”

“Ain’t much quick about gettin’ anywhere tonight, Shad,” he said, then wished he hadn’t spit out those words. He leaned over, helping his friend get a thick wool scarf adjusted over his face so that it protected everything below the eyes. “There now. Can’t believe you don’t trust a nigger like me after all our years partnered up. You just stay in the saddle an’ you can count on me taking you right to Shell Woman. She’ll have a big, warm fire going for us, and my woman gonna have some hot food waiting for your belly—”

“Shell Woman’s gonna use her power to heal me, Scratch.”

“You ’member that—how she’ll go to work on your arm,” he said as he tugged on the packhorse’s lead rope. “Mend you up just fine.”

“Just listen for her,” Shad said in a raspy voice, muted somewhat by the wool muffler and the growing cry of the wind. “Shell Woman gonna lead us back to camp. All you gotta do is listen.”

The sharp, icy snowflakes slashed at any bare flesh exposed as Titus led them on into the dark, plodding warily across the shifting, icy landscape. But for all that he strained, Bass couldn’t hear anything but the faint keen of the wind as it slinked out of the coulees and whined along the tops of the ridges overhead. That, and the steady, insistent crackle as the icy snow slapped against the fur of his coat and cap. And the snorts of the horses. His had even started to fight the reins.

“Hol’ up there.”

Sweete said nothing, head slung between his shoulders, half conscious, likely half dead, as Bass stiffly lunged to the ground and felt his way up the horse’s neck to its muzzle. Ice was building up, crusting around its nostrils. Poor beast couldn’t breathe, what with the wind slinging that sleety snow at them nearly dead-on. Hammering his blanket mitten against his thigh, Scratch next used the mitten to rub over the animal’s nostrils, then its eyes. Turning in the dark as the snow whipped around them, he did the same to Shad’s mount, then the packhorse. Layers of warm, misty gauze haloed about him as the horses in turn bobbed their heads and whickered in gratitude.

Of a sudden the wind died—he turned on his heel. The hair rose at the back of his neck as the faint sound crept beneath the scarf and the fur cap, snaking its way into his senses. It was a voice. No, something like a voice. As he stood there, rooted to the spot, the wind came up again and he was instantly unsure if he had really heard what he thought he had heard. Maybe words … but he wouldn’t swear to having heard what could be called words. At least not any language he knew of or had ever heard with his own ears.

Bass turned and peered up at Sweete. The way Shad had come awake, his face was raised, turned into the wind—Titus knew he had been listening too. But that wasn’t Shell Woman, he told himself. What had made that sound wasn’t someone who spoke Cheyenne. Scratch had been listening to enough of that tongue from the lips of both his old friend and Shell Woman too that he could recognize what that wind-borne sound wasn’t. He might not know for certain what that noise was that made the hair stand on his arms … but he was for sure what it wasn’t.

“You hear it too?” Shadrach asked.

“Thought it was the wind,” he said guardedly.

“Foller it,” Sweete declared weakly, his head sagging. “It’ll get me to Shell Woman.”

“It’s coming from the wrong direction, Shad. We go off that way, we won’t never—”

“Foller it, Titus Bass,” he gasped in desperation. “If I never ask ’nother thing of you, just foller the voice tonight.”

Stopping right beneath the big man and looking up at Sweete’s shadowy form, Bass argued with himself a moment, unsure if Shad had gone soft-headed from loss of blood. Titus said, “A voice? Sound I heard wasn’t no voice.”

“I ain’t got no strength to fight you,” Shad admitted as his head sagged. “An’ I wouldn’t know the goddamned difference if you took me off somewheres else to die. But, I’m asking this one and only thing of you. Take me to Shell Woman. I know that’s her calling to me in this storm.”

Taking a step closer so that he stood right at Sweete’s knee, Titus reassuringly patted the buffalo robe he had wrapped around the wounded man’s legs to protect Shad from the driving force of the snowstorm. “I ain’t gonna fight you neither, Shadrach. My best sense tells me that sound come from—”

“It was the voice.”

“Awright, the voice … it come from the wrong direction,” Scratch continued. “But, at the same time my good sense tells me to keep pointing our noses off in the direction I had us going, down in my bones something says to trust you on this.”

“Shell Woman’s calling me.”

“Awright, Shad. I’m taking you to her.”

When he settled into the saddle and wrapped that ice-coated half-robe around his legs once more, Bass took his bearings from that eerie call come on the wind, then reined the horses sharply to the left. The wind didn’t feel right against them. The air itself didn’t go down well when he sucked it through the warmth of that blanket muffler. And the horses? They fought him for a while, even though they were no longer nosing right into the storm. Eventually, his horse grew weary of fighting, dropped its head, and plodded on in the direction Scratch took them.

And every time the wind died, he strained to listen—making out the faintest drift of sound. Not no voice, like Shadrach claimed it was. Leastways, no sound he could call human, speaking a language he could put a name to. From time to time as the minutes, then hours, trickled past in an agonizingly slow procession, Scratch made a small adjustment in their direction. Each time the wind itself seemed to take a breath and that eerie sound came out of the dizzying black of that stormy night, he eased over a little more to the right or turned off a little more to the left. And every step of the way the deepening cold came to suck at what reserves he had always thought he possessed. But, that had been when he was a younger man.

So cold it had grown, Bass was sure his mind had started to numb. Having to remind himself to keep his eyes open in narrow slits—watching ahead for the edge of a coulee or an escarpment of boulders they might plunge over. Someone had to keep an eye open, and his ears alert. If they were being beckoned into hell by the devil hisself, at least it would be a damn sight warmer in those diggin’s. Breath by breath, step by rocking, slippery step, they inched into the night, right into the growing fury of the storm … then right when Titus thought he had finally fallen asleep, all his senses so dulled by the cold and the chaotic frenzy of the wind—that wind up and died.

For some reason a small part of him had remained alert—expecting the unrepentant wind to keep on howling around them, whip at their robes and mufflers, bluster at the horses’ manes, hurling icy snow at their eyes again after that momentary pause, but … the wind never rose above a whisper. A quiet, haunting whisper. It was as if Scratch came awake slowly, not with a start, but groggily, eventually becoming aware that all sound had died except for the crunch of each hoof as it plunged forward, the grunting heave of the played-out animals beneath them, the groaning creak of the ice-rimed saddle leather. Scratch had been in blizzards before. Times past when he had tucked his head down and gritted his teeth, riding on through the storm’s battering to safety … but, he could never remember riding himself right on out of one.

This leaving the storm behind, this earth-shaking silence—it was damn sure enough to give a man the shakes, if he hadn’t been shaking with the bone-numbing cold as it was already.

Scratch tucked his head to the side and turned about with slight, leaden movements to look behind them. Back there the snow swirled, the wind still whipping it into a froth. But here the howl was no more than a whimper, a mere shadow of its former bluster. He straightened in the saddle and glanced over at his half-conscious friend. Then he peered ahead once more, his eyes growing wide when he heard that faintest of whispers brought across the icy heave of the land.

Shuddering, he sensed the not knowing give way to those first slight twinges of fear. Ignorance did that to a man, he chided himself. But his scolding served no purpose. He didn’t know what was happening to them, and the not knowing would do everything it could to make him afraid. As the whisper grew inexorably louder, Titus didn’t know if it was really a sound from out there in the black of the storm … or if he was hearing something born of his own imagination, something bred to echo within his own mind. Between his ears, rather than coming to his ears from beyond—

Then it struck him brutally. With that thought of the Beyond, a molten, fluid fear slammed him hard, squarely against the middle of his breastbone with breath-robbing force. Suspicious, he twisted about again to look behind them at that dark bulk of the storm, the immense curtains of billowing ground blizzard—at that spot from which they had just emerged from the torment of its frenzy into this netherworld of near silence.

His eyes opened wide, transfixed on the horizon.

Was that a crack in the dark storm clouds, a crack in the heaving vapors of snow? Had they somehow blundered through that crack in the sky Ol’ Bill Williams had instructed him about so many seasons before? Time was he had thought the superstitious Solitaire was just given to things a mite ghosty. But over time, especially in these years since the bottom fell out of the beaver trade, and those hardy few who had remained in the mountains had been retreating farther and farther from contact with civilized and genteel white society, Titus had encountered one small incident after another—no one of which was enough to make him a believer in Solitaire’s mystical realm—but taken together now they were more than enough for even the most thorny skeptic to believe he was in the presence of the great unexplainable.

In the silence of that heart-stopping moment—overwhelmed with the crystal clarity of pinprick stars exploding against the utter black of the sky and the gaping endlessness of a snow-covered monotony of heaving land—something told him he had not only been lured up to the very precipice of, but sucked right on through, that invisible crack said to exist between the world of a man’s everyday reality and the unseen realm of spirits and haunts, shades and hoo-doos.

Never a man who was incapacitated by the fear of what he could see, Scratch was beginning to think he had forgotten to stay awake, that he had drifted off to sleep in the mind-freezing bluster of the storm and was already in the process of dying … maybe even dead already—now that the roar of the wind had suddenly faded as if a door had been closed behind him. Probably dead, he thought. Maybe this is hell itself, looming right here on the other side of what had always been the sky—a hell of dark and cold, a void absent of all light and warmth. Why, even the stars had never seemed this far away. Was this his dying? Would this cold and ceaseless wandering be the endlessness of all time for him?

Of a sudden his horse jerked its head up and snorted, snapping Bass to attention. His senses responded, tingling, every fiber of him suddenly electrified. Just ahead the shadows shifted. The packhorse whinnied, then Sweete’s animal sidestepped and pulled at the reins warily. Scratch could not remember his mouth ever being so dry.

Slowly a liquid shadow congealed at the horizon, as if a sliver from the black of night had itself oozed down upon the pale luminescence of the snowy, barren landscape. Closer and closer it advanced on Bass as he considered turning one way or another, to flee what he could not fully see. Then, the shadow’s form sharpened on the bluish background hue of the icy snow and gradually became a rider. A huge horse, the figure seated upon it flapping as if with wings. It made him shudder to remember the tales from the Bible learned at his mother’s knee, a terrifying mythology come to haunt a young boy’s nightly dreams with frightful visions of winged horsemen racing o’er the land, bringing pestilence, destruction, doom, and death in their wake.

But … this was only one horseman. Bass looked woodenly left, and right. Only one rider come charging out of the maw of hell—

Its cry was almost human, even childlike. He might almost believe the oncoming creature’s shrill cry called out solely for him.

Surely the maker of that disconcerting sound was attempting to deceive him, to make Titus Bass believe it was a human voice that had reached his ears. Something in that cry discomfited him … but he steeled himself, stiffening his backbone against their impending clash. No, he decided. He would not heed that mournful cry coming from the throat of that devil’s whelp. Instead, he would prepare to fight its cold death with a fire of his own. Scratch clumsily wrapped his wooden hand around the big butt of the pistol stuffed in the front of his belt and pulled the weapon free. He doubted whether the lead ball could harm this winged creature of no substance, merely passing through the horseman—

“Po … !”

That part of the eerie whisper reaching him now was even louder still, as the figure continued to take on more shape, less fluid now.

Scratch’s red horse stepped sideways, then he righted it with a savage tug on the reins. Damned animal was fighting him more now than it had when they were both being mangled in the teeth of the storm. Not a single reason for its actions but pure contrariness, he supposed. No blowing snow clogging its nostrils or blinding its eyes. Only reason for it to fight him was that dumb beasts could damn well act consarn and contrary in the presence of a formless demon. As if the beasts of the earth had some sense that man did not possess which warned them of what might not really be there—

“Popo!”

As the sound reached his muffled ears, Titus turned slightly to look off to his right for Shadrach. The man had his eyes closed, matted with icy snow. Likely sleeping. “You hear that?” he asked.

Sweete did not stir.

“Jehoshaphat,” Bass grumbled, wondering for the first time if Shad was dead and frozen. Losing all that blood. It was the blood, after all, that kept a man warm, wasn’t it?

As that dark figure loomed closer he pulled back the hammer on the pistol by inching it along the wide, tack-studded belt he had buckled around his heavy elkhide coat. From beneath the specter’s hood came a high-pitched, shrill whistle—strange and wavering, not at all human … but a sound Titus felt he knew. All the more uncomfortable again, and that discomfort made a haven for the fear to grow. He realized he could reckon on hea specter’s sound in another place, another time. But the high, shrill whistle did not fit here and now.

Raising the pistol at the end of his wooden arm, he brought the muzzle to bear at the onrushing spirit that had just kicked its horse into a lope, gaining speed across the dull glow of snow left between them.

The haunt whistled again—at which Bass’s horse and the pack animal threw back their heads and whinnied. That proved it to him. This evil spirit had the power to command the dumb beasts of burden, to make them revolt against man.

“G-go b-back to hell!”

As his words croaked from his throat, the specter’s flowing arm came out, and up, yanking back the hood from its evil face—

“Popo! It’s me!”

He blinked. Then again. His mouth gone all the drier. By the everlasting! This screaming hoo-doo had taken on the shape of his oldest boy!

“I’ll send you straight to hell right here and now!” Titus roared angrily, pained to his marrow that this haunt would know exactly how to pierce his heart with fear and confusion—

“Popo! I come out to find you!”

“You go make your magic on some other poor child! I’m half froze an’ I ain’t in no mood for none of it—”

“My mother asked me to—”

“F-flea?” he stammered, baffled by the spirit’s use of the Crow tongue.

“It’s me, Popo!” the youngster pleaded as a gust of wind whipped his long, black hair across his face. The boy brought up a blanket mitten and tugged the wool muffler off his chin.

“D-d-damn!” Bass shrieked. “It is you, son! What in the name of tarnal truth?” And then he remembered not to shove so much American at his boy, not near so quickly. “What you doin’ here?” he asked in Crow.

“For a long time after it became so cold, so dark, I begged my mother, told her I could find you, but she did not believe me,” Flea explained as he halted his horse and Scratch’s came to a stop alongside it.

“My heart overflows with joy to see you!” Titus bellowed as he leaned woodenly to the side and seized the boy in his arms, squeezing, pounding, hammering the youth exuberantly.

Once Scratch had leaned back and touched Flea’s face with his left hand as if he were unable to believe the boy was really there, he asked, “Your mother did not want you to leave the place where you made our camp?”

“No.”

Shadrach came to a halt beside them, all the horses raising wispy clouds of vapor in that small knot of man and beast. Sweete started to clumsily pull at the wool scarf that had protected his face.

Bass snorted, “So you waited until your mother was asleep, then you left on your own?”

Flea smiled. “I do not think she was really asleep. Only pretending to sleep. She knew how I wanted to come, and I believe she wanted me to find you. It had been so long for the dark, with no moonrise—”

“This means your mother will be angry with you,” Titus said, patting the youngster’s leg. “And she will be angry with me if I don’t punish you for going against her wishes.”

“But I found you.”

“Perhaps that will soften her anger.” Bass pointed off in the direction Flea’s dim hoofprints led toward the horizon, eventually disappearing. “How far did you come to find us?”

“Not far,” Flea declared. “I called to your horses all the way here. I whistled for them too.”

“C-called for our horses?” Sweete asked.

Turning to the wounded man, Titus said, “The boy, my son—I didn’t tell you—he can talk to horses. Has a special medeecin to understand what they say to him too.”

Flea added, “I called out to them in the darkness, Popo. Every step of the way I came.”

“And that’s how you knew where to find us in the storm?”

Flea wagged his head, bewildered. “W-what storm?”

“You didn’t come searching for us because of the storm that blew down on this ground where we went to hunt buffalo?”

“No,” and the boy shook his head in confusion, “there was no storm this night.”

“N-no storm?” Sweete echoed.

Titus turned slowly in the saddle to peer behind them, wondering anew if perhaps he hadn’t really frozen to death in that ground blizzard, and had indeed ridden through that jagged opening between the world of mortal existence and the world of immortal and everlasting spirits the moment they put the storm behind them. Maybe this was only a part of the dream of death, the dream that came with a man’s passage from all that was to what would always be. Flea and the trail his son would take to lead them back to the rimrock, back to the place where Shad and Scratch had deposited their families before riding off to hunt buffalo, could be part of the death dream too. A place meant to confuse him into thinking he was still alive—when it was nothing but what his heart most fervently hoped at the moment he had died.

What he was now experiencing was nothing more than what he had been praying for in those moments before he had lumbered on through that ragged crack in the sky. At least the haunts and spirits of this cold land of after-death granted a man his final wish. Now he would see and hold his loved ones just one more time.

“Take us back to the others, Flea,” he said quietly, with no small degree of resignation that he had been swept up in something he could not understand. “Take us back.”

It was still dark when the rimrock loomed out of the night. What a good place to camp, he prided himself now. The westward-facing rock would have held the last of the sun’s warmth from the day, and once darkness fell the fire’s heat would radiate from the face of the cliff, warming the narrow hollow where the women were just beginning to unpack the horses when the men set off on their hunt. There, to the right, he spotted the first flicker of light against the face of the rim-rock—the dim dance of a fire. After the immense, bone-numbing darkness, after the absence of all light save for the subtle flicker of those frozen stars overhead, the reflection of that warm glow pulled him onward like the heat of her body as she always gave herself to him.

Shell Woman was apparently the first to hear their horses, even before Ghost and Digger did. She arose at the fire, turning, and moved in their direction. Wrapped in her blanket, she was only a few strides away from the horsemen when she noticed the bloodstained coat and that crude bandage of frozen green buffalo hide—and lunged to a halt beside Shadrach’s horse, her fingers in midair, hesitating to touch the thick wrapping.

“He said you’d know what to do,” Bass started to explain, then stilled his tongue when he realized Shell Woman didn’t understand much American, and he couldn’t speak any Cheyenne.

As soon as she had freed the yapping, eager dogs from their rope restraints, Waits-by-the-Water was hurrying his way, her eyes flicking from his face to Shadrach and back again. “I’m whole,” he said to her. “It’s Shad. Got took by some wolves.”

As he landed woodenly on the ground, she buried her face in his neck, wordlessly.

Having his arms around her again was like being home. But a thought scared him anew. Titus whispered against her hair, “Are you real?”

She pulled her face away from his chest, then tore off one of his mittens. Pitching it aside, she brought his hand to her cold cheek, where he could feel the tracks of hot moisture spilling from her eyes. “Can you feel how real I am?”

“I-I thought this all was … my death dream,” he whispered as he crushed her against him anew. “Dreaming of being back with you, when I was really froze to death out there in the dark.”

“You won’t see your death dream for many, many seasons to come,” she assured him with a sob.

Nearby, Sweete was clumsily attempting to twist himself around in the saddle.

“Wait, Shad,” Bass ordered as he tore himself away from his wife. “I’ll come help you an’ Shell Woman.”

As Titus pulled the big man out of his frozen saddle, he grunted, “Flea, get the meat off the packhorse. Give it to your sister. You build up the fire while Magpie cuts off some meat to roast for us. We ain’t et … not in a long time.”

Without a word of reply from either of them, Flea and Magpie went to work as Waits hurried away to fetch her parfleche filled with roots and leaves, spores and spiders’ webs.

The moment she and Bass had Shadrach lowered to the ground at the side of the crackling fire, Shell Woman tenderly kissed her husband on the forehead. Her tears glistened on both cheeks, narrow, shimmering streams tracing the roundness of her cheeks as she turned away from the flickering light and went to search among her own baggage.

With a painful sigh, Shad began to talk to her in Cheyenne. Back and forth they spoke in low tones. Scratch figured Sweete was explaining to her what had happened with the wolves, how they fought off the beasts, and Bass’s attempt to stem the flow of blood. On the far side of the fire little Jackrabbit sat up among the mounds of blankets and robes, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his tiny hands. Though he made not a sound, his mother leaned over and whispered to him. The boy nodded, his eyes fixed on Sweete, as if realizing that something grave was occurring before his wide eyes, which were taking in everything. Patting the blankets where the small boy sat, Waits called to the two dogs. Digger and Ghost trotted over and lay down by Jackrabbit, protectively.

After she had set two small kettles of water over the fire, Waits carried her parfleche of medicinals to a bare spot beside the wounded man. Magpie quietly worked her knife down into the frozen meat, carving off thin hunks she hung from sharpened sticks at the edge of those flames young Flea was feeding with twigs he had broken off of the deadwood dragged into their campsite.

“You get me something lean back on, Scratch?” Shad asked.

He pulled over some prairie saddles and a canvas-wrapped bundle, shoving the bundle against Sweete’s back. As the big man slowly eased backward, the saddles kept the bundle from sliding under his weight. Titus knelt beside Waits-by-the-Water at Shad’s right side, opposite Shell Woman.

“Help her,” Sweete asked. “G’won an’ cut this damn hide off my arm.”

One by one Scratch sliced through the stiff, narrow strips of frozen hide he had tied around the long section of skin he had bound around the gory wound. All around the edges of the crude bandage Shad’s coat was ragged, torn, and blackened with frozen blood. Stiffened, bloody fragments of his cotton shirtsleeve and the faded red-wool longhandles feathered up around the frozen edges of the buffalo hide.

When Shell Woman began to open a large, painted rawhide box she had placed on the ground beside her husband, Scratch asked Shad, “She gonna take it off?”

“Says she won’t, not till it’s soft.”

“That water she’s heating?”

Sweete nodded, his face drained of color. “I’m afeared this’s gonna hurt something fierce.”

“Only way to get her medicine on them cuts is to get that bandage off.”

“You stopped the bleeding, you beautiful son of a bitch,” Sweete whispered as he looked up with moist eyes. “You kept me from dying.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” he answered reluctantly. “I just done what you asked me—get you to Shell Woman. She’s gotta mend you now.”

Without a word, Sweete let his head rock back against the bundle and closed his eyes once more. Several minutes later Waits carried the first kettle over to the Cheyenne woman. Then she handed Sweete’s wife a tin cup. From her rawhide box Shell Woman dug out some powders she sprinkled on the surface of the steamy kettle. Next she produced some dried roots, which she rubbed between her palms over the water, fragments and dust from the roots spilling into the kettle as she murmured over and over again a fervent prayer.

After dipping her bare finger into the hot water, Shell Woman nodded to her husband and scooped out a cupful. Positioning it over the frozen, rock-hard buffalo hide, she continued to whisper her prayers while she began to slowly dribble the hot water onto the stiffened skin. As the tiny, delicate stream of water steamed onto the arm and into Shad’s lap, she closed her eyes.

At the far side of the fire Flea was making noise as he broke apart limbs and branches to feed the fire that was holding back both the frightening cold and the terrifying darkness. Titus signaled his son to stop, gesturing at the Cheyenne woman. The youngster understood the gravity of the ceremony.

For what seemed like the longest time as the cold stars swirled overhead and the Seven Sisters traveled at least a fourth of their journey across the sky, Shell Woman poured one hot cup of water after another on the buffalo hide. From time to time she would turn Shadrach’s arm slightly, to moisten another part of the frozen skin. When she had scooped out the last of the water from the first kettle, she asked for the second container and prepared that kettle by crumbling dried roots and leaves into the steamy water, all without any interruption to her monotonous, repeated prayers.

Eventually Titus heard the scrape of the tin cup across the bottom of that second empty vessel. Shell Woman dropped the cup at her side, leaned back, and closed her eyes as she held her hands just above the soggy buffalo hide, her fingers spread wide. When she finally breathed the last of her prayers and opened her eyes, Shell Woman slipped her fingers under the edges of the moistened hide. Bass winced, knowing this was going to hurt Shadrach. No matter how moist Shell Woman could have gotten the thick, green hide, with all that blood drying, coagulating, and freezing too—it was going to cause some excruciating pain when she ripped the buffalo hair from that jagged spiderweb of deep lacerations.

Sliding up on his knees right beside his friend, Titus seized Shadrach’s right hand so that Sweete wouldn’t be able to fling the arm at Shell Woman, attempting to prevent his woman from ripping that bloodied, furry bandage from those wounds shrieking in agony. Inch by inch, she pulled back on the soggy hide; every new moment, with each new tug, Bass was prepared for Shad to try jerking away from the hold he had on him. But, surprisingly, the big man did not flinch, not one little twitch, as he and Titus watched in wonder while the last edge of the soggy hide came away in Shell Woman’s hands—

Scratch felt the breath catch in his throat as he stared at what had been a series of messy, gaping, oozy wounds where the blood simply refused to cease flowing while he laid the green hide over them. Instead, what he now bent over to inspect was a series of thick, swollen welts, each long line appearing like a dark, oiled rope—the sort riverboatmen used on the Kentucky flatboats. And protruding from the tangle of dark welts was a gleaming white hair that shimmered in the fire’s light. He glanced at Shadrach, finding as much amazement on Sweete’s face as he knew was on his—then, unable to resist any longer, Titus reached out with a lone finger to brush along one of the welts. It really was fuzzy after all. He yanked the finger back, suddenly afraid. This was strange to the extreme.

“Where’d all the blood on my arm go?” Shadrach asked. “Feel this here,” Titus instructed.

“That can’t be buffler hair, can it?” Sweete said as he pulled his finger away, leaning close.

Scratch himself bent over to inspect the welts again, rubbing a finger across the swollen wounds, sensing the stiffened fuzziness of the hairs sealed within the jagged lacerations. “Cain’t be. The hairs ain’t black, like the hair I tied ’round your arm.”

“So is it, or isn’t it the buffler hair?”

With a shake of his head, Bass leaned back and stared into Sweete’s eyes. “Some hair, from somethin’, got closed up in them wounds, slicker’n a nigger could do if’n he’d been trying to knit a wound in just that way.”

“B-but, you didn’t do that—”

“No, I didn’t, Shadrach,” he whispered. “I don’t know for sure, but it seem to me the hide done it on its own.”

Sweete followed Bass’s eyes … down, down to gaze at the soggy buffalo hide spread across Shell Woman’s lap.

“The damn thing ain’t bloody at all,” Shad gasped quietly with a shudder.

Titus swallowed with difficulty and croaked, “Lookit the color of that hide, Shadrach.”

“W-we didn’t shoot no white buffler … that cow we was cutting up when the wolves jumped us weren’t white!”

Scratch leaned over, brushing his fingers across the wide strip of white fur lying across the Cheyenne woman’s lap. He glanced up at Waits-by-the-Water and found she still held her hand over her mouth in astonishment. As Bass lifted the rectangular strip of soggy white buffalo hide off Shell Woman’s lap, the Cheyenne woman leaned against her husband, silently beginning to sob, her shoulders quaking.

“You told me to bring you to her, Shad.”

Sweete cradled his wife against him. “My gut told me that was the only way I’d hold off dying. Didn’t wanna go under out there on my own.”

“You wasn’t figgering that her medeecin was gonna keep you from dyin’?”

With a shake of his head, Shad said, “I only knowed my heart’d be stronger if I died with her right there beside me. N-never really knowed for sure she had her mother’s power.”

“Her mother’s power?” Titus repeated. “What power is that?”

“Been handed down, mother to daughter, for generations back in them Cheyennes.”

“What medeecin?”

“White buffalo—an’ it’s a strong power.”

“I figger Shell Woman knows she’s just found out she’s got that power handed down to her,” Bass sighed, staring down at those white hairs bristling from the welts of torn tissue and coagulated blood. “I figger she knows her white buffalo medeecin saved your life.”

^* Ride the Moon Down