Wind Walker

TWENTY-FIVE

By the middle of that summer’s moons, the two young lovers were no longer standing with the blanket wrapped around them and their foreheads touching. Instead, Waits-by-the-Water told them they could put the blanket over their heads to give them just about all the privacy young lovers could enjoy before they exchanged commitment vows in front of their families and friends.

But, it hadn’t been an easy journey seeing Magpie to her wedding day. For some time Titus Bass had known women were a headstrong bunch. He’d not encountered anything to change his opinion on that until he found out there was indeed a creature more headstrong than any woman he had ever known … and that was an adolescent female with her juices all stirred up for a handsome young warrior. How the family had ever gotten to this warm summer day without killing one another would be a story worth telling his grandchildren over and over again. A tale of pain and tears, a tale of just how the heart could shatter into innumerable pieces. A story of how Magpie eventually won a victory, how she had triumphed in what her heart wanted most.

Above the grassy meadow in sight of the log walls of Meldrum’s Fort Alexander the sun was reaching its zenith and the crowd had gathered, murmuring quietly, as Titus led Waits-by-the-Water through their midst, slowly making a circle of the great camp crescent, moving at the head of the throng, gathering more and more onlookers, who followed them back toward their lodge. Eventually they stood before their own door as the crowd parted and the pony carrying the young warrior came through the whispering people. Yes, he had never looked more handsome—this proud, young war leader. On a pony beside the youngster rode the old seer, Real Bird, his eyes grown even more milky of late. The pair of horsemen stopped before the lodge of the white man and his Crow wife, dismounting and handing their reins to young herder boys who led the animals away.

The crowd fell to a hush as the young man took the old prophet’s arm and led Real Bird those last few steps, so that they both stood before the trapper who had made his home among the Apsaluuke people.

“Who is this comes to my lodge this day?” Titus asked as the crowd hushed.

“I am Don’t Mix,” the young warrior replied with a strong voice. “And I bring the holy man, Real Bird, with me.”

Already Scratch had a hard lump in his throat. The words came with difficulty as he croaked, “Why do you bring this holy man, this physician, this great healer with you today, Don’t Mix?”

“I bring the holy man here this day so that he can perform a wedding.”

“A wedding for who, Don’t Mix?”

He stood tall, a few inches above the old white man, as he proclaimed, “A wedding of your daughter—Magpie … and the man who loves her more than any other man ever could.”

“Who … who is this man who dares say he loves my daughter more than any other man ever could?” Scratch demanded. “Who dares to say that he loves my Magpie more than her father?”

“I would tell you his name,” Don’t Mix declared in a clear voice as he took a step aside, leaving Real Bird there before Waits-by-the-Water and Titus Bass, “but he will proudly tell you himself.”

“Who is this man?” the trapper demanded again, hurling his voice over the silent crowd. “I want him to show his face and tell me how much he loves my daughter before he hopes to take her hand in life’s hazardous journey.”

“It is me!” Turns Back announced at that dramatic moment, standing far to the side of the throng.

Expectantly, the crowd parted for his spotted pony. Behind him, Turns Back led a dozen of the finest horses in all of Absaroka. On two of them he had packed everything he owned, what few clothes and weapons were his alone, along with his shield and totems and the small shelter he and his new bride would erect at the edge of camp for their wedding night.

“Who speaks up, brave enough to say he is prepared to take my daughter from her father?” Titus roared, the lump hard in his throat, his eyes smarting as he looked upon this young man who came to a halt before the lodge.

“Turns Back is my name,” he said as the crowd fell breathless and he slid from the back of that spotted pony. Then he handed Titus Bass the reins to his warhorse. “I have come here to ask that you let me marry your daughter.”

Scratch turned to glance at his wife, finding that she too was crying, tears streaming down her bright copper cheeks, her eyes glistening in the midday light. He turned back to the young man, stared down at the reins in his hand, then held out those reins to the suitor. “I could never take a man’s war pony, Turns Back.”

An anxious murmur shot through the crowd.

“I will give away everything I own,” the warrior vowed, turning slightly to indicate his poor possessions and those twelve horses. “Give you all that I have if you will only say I can marry your daughter, Pote Ani.”

“Take back your war pony,” he declared, lifting the warrior’s hand and placing the reins into his palm. “I can’t accept such a gift from a courageous warrior of the people.”

Turns Back stared at his hand and those reins, fear and surprise in his eyes—for this was not the way things were supposed to happen at this very moment in the ceremony.

So Titus did his very best to reassure the young man who had despair written across his face. “You are a warrior of our people,” Scratch told him as his voice slowly grew stronger. “And a warrior must have a war pony to fight our enemies.”

“Then take the rest of these horses,” Turns Back pleaded before that hushed crowd of onlookers, murmuring about the father’s refusal of gifts. “Take everything that I own—”

“You do not own very much, so it seems,” Scratch chided him, looking over what little was loaded on those two ponies.

Turns Back hung his head. “I know it is not enough to pay you for the hand of someone so wonderful as your daughter, Magpie. In fact, I realize I will never own anything near enough to pay in return for a woman like Magpie.”

“Look at me, Turns Back,” he commanded. The warrior raised his eyes, unflinchingly steady at the white man. “I think a good man is one who gives away much of what he owns. He returns from a raid—and he gives away the horses he has stolen. He brings back blankets and weapons—he gives them away as well. Is this what you have done, Turns Back? After every raid against the Blackfoot, the Assiniboine, the Lakota, and others?”

“Yes,” he answered in a clear voice. “I would have kept it all in trade for Magpie if I had known that you would want it in return for your daughter.”

“No, Turns Back,” he said with a stone face. “I don’t want your horses. I don’t want all that you own. None of it is worth anything to me.”

The crowd gasped. This had never been done before. No father had ever turned down the offer of gifts for his daughter when a marriage ceremony was announced and the whole village brought together in this way. People all around them were whispering, many of them leaning in to get themselves a look at the face of Turns Back as he stood there in abject shock. This white man had just broken the long-standing tradition of the Apsaluuke.

Turns Back started to stammer, “I-I have n-nothing more to offer—”

“I want only one thing from you, Turns Back,” Titus said as he reached out and took hold of his wife’s hand with his left. Then he raised his right hand and held it out between himself and the young warrior, palm up. “These ponies, these weapons and totems—they are not worth anywhere near as much as what it is that I want my daughter to have from you.”

“Wh-what can I give you to make you let me marry her?”

“It’s not what I want from you, Turns Back,” he said, seizing the warrior’s wrist firmly. “It’s what I want to know that you will give my daughter.”

“Anything!”

“Your heart,” he said to the youngster in a whisper. “Tell me she will forever have all of your heart.”

Relief washed over the young man’s face, and his eyes began to pool with emotion. “Yes! Yes, this I promise you!”

“Promise her … promise her this now,” Titus said as he released his hold on the warrior’s wrist and took a step back to the lodge, pulling aside the door flap.

Out of the darkness stepped a radiant white light as Turns Back gasped in surprise. Magpie had never looked more beautiful.

Her hair gleamed, shiny with bear grease, both braids intertwined with red silk ribbon, each wrapped with white ermine skins, the black tips of their tails spilling across the tops of her breasts. The fringes on the sleeves were so long on that snowy white dress they nearly brushed the ground, where she stood in a pair of matching white moccasins tied around her ankles. The entire yoke of the dress, both front and back, was covered with the milk teeth of the elk, the umber crowns which tarnished those teeth stark against the blinding whiteness of the gown. Down both shoulders ran a four-inch-wide strip of porcupine quills of brilliant colors: oxblood red, greasy yellow, robin’s-egg blue, and a hint of moss green. It was truly the most beautiful dress Waits-by-the-Water and her eldest daughter could have created for this most special day.

Down the center part of her hair, Magpie had rubbed a dark strip of purple vermilion dye, and a smear of it to high-light each cheek, in addition to one wide strip of the reddish paint extending down the center of her chin. This would be the last day she could ever wear paint as a woman of the Crow. From this day on, she would no longer be a virgin. Now she would be a wife—

“Tell my daughter, Turns Back,” Titus spoke in the hush of that crowd admiring the beauty of this bride who stood in their midst. “Tell Magpie what you wish to give her.”

Turns Back took a step forward so that he stood right before the young woman. At last she raised her eyes to his. They never once left his face as he took the wide eagle-feather fan from her hands and passed it on to Magpie’s mother.

“Magpie,” he said, his voice cracking with nervousness, this time in the way of a young lover declaring himself, “I give you everything I own.”

“Turns Back, I was standing inside my parents’ lodge when you spoke of this to my father.”

“I don’t have much to give you … but I give it all to you.” He wrapped his hands around both of hers and held them midway between their breasts.

“Do I have your heart?” she asked. “This day, and for all days?”

“Yes, oh, yes,” he answered fervently.

“That is all I could ever ask of you, Turns Back,” she said in the stillness of that moment. “There are others who can offer me many fine things … but you are the one who has won my heart. You are the one who can give me what no other man can ever give me.”

“Then you will be my wife?”

“Yes, Turns Back,” she said, starting to cry, smiling in spite of the tears. “I will be your wife … and bear your children … and I will wait for you when you ride off to make war on the enemies of our people … and—I will grow old with you, Turns Back. Like the seasons of the year, we will know our spring and summer, our autumn, and we will know our winter too. I will grow old with you … and I promise my heart will love you more each day of our life together.”

Tears spilled from Turns Back’s eyes as he looked over at the old prophet. He asked, “Real Bird, will you step over here and give us your blessing? Will you say a prayer for our union?”

Titus helped the old man shuffle closer, then pulled Waits-by-the-Water close, so that the three of them stood around the young couple, joining their arms to form a circle of love around Turns Back and Magpie as Real Bird began to sing, his high, reedy voice sailing on the breeze of that hot summer day.

The four of them were crying for joy, tears streaming from their eyes as the old prophet gave wing to his prayers for these young newlyweds, his own blind eyes closed as he raised his face and shouted at the sky.

“Creator Above! Hear me! Grant this man and his woman your every blessing. May he be strong in protecting your people … and may she be fruitful in bearing the generations to come!”

Opening his eyes he held out his thin, bony hands to the young couple. Slowly he raised their arms in the air with his and gave a wild, shrill cry. All around their small circle the many hundreds lifted their voices, drunk with triumph and celebration. Men yipped exuberantly, women trilled their tongues in victory calls, and children screamed and laughed, suddenly freed to dart in and out of the crowd, shrieking joyously in play.

Turns Back seized his new bride, clutching her against him tightly as they both gushed with laughter on this happy, happy day. Scratch leaned in to kiss his daughter on the cheek as Waits-by-the-Water kissed Magpie’s other cheek. Then the old trapper pounded his new son-in-law on the back of his war shirt, which was draped with black-tipped winter-white ermine tails and enemy scalp locks. Suddenly among them were Jackrabbit and Flea, the tall youth lifting up little Crane so the girl could give her big sister a congratulatory embrace.

“The feasting and songs will begin as soon as we walk down to the grove by the river!” Titus roared above the tumult as the throngs surged in to shout their wishes at the newlyweds.

Led by Don’t Mix, all of Turns Back’s loyal friends had been helping the white man over the last few days, hunting buffalo, digging long trenches, and dragging in a great store of firewood before they started roasting huge slabs of lean, red meat over the immense beds of coal they had begun firing day before last.

“I could not have done this without you, Don’t Mix,” Titus said to the young warrior as they reached the crowded grove, where Magpie’s girlfriends were helping to carve off chunks of buffalo for everyone pressing forward in a great wave.

“Everything is as it should be, Pote Ani,” he said to the trapper. “Your daughter is in love with my best friend. If she could not marry me, then she deserves to have Turns Back as her husband.”

“Thank you for not standing in their way and making things hard on them when he finally went to her and spoke of the feelings in his heart,” Scratch confided. “And when Magpie came to you and told you she wanted to marry another.”

He smiled in that handsome face of his. “It is for the best! Now I have lots of time to look over the other girls in the village and pick one of them for my bride!”

“Titus Bass!”

He turned at the loud call, recognizing the voice of the old friend before his eye found Robert Meldrum threading his way through the milling crowd, a small brown jug suspended at the end of one arm, two tin cups looped in the fingers of the other hand.

“Round Iron!” he cried, using the Crows’ name for the American Fur Company trader, which referred to Meldrum’s blacksmithing abilities practiced here at Fort Alexander.

The trader had himself married into the Crow tribe, making him an invaluable asset to his employers. He had a long history in the fur trade, all the way back to ’27, when he first came west with William H. Ashley’s brigades, tramping across the Rocky Mountain West with the likes of Bridger, Carson, Meek, and Fitzpatrick.

“I brung some of the company’s special brandy for this very special day,” Meldrum announced as he stomped up in front of the old trapper and held out the cups to Bass. He winked at Waits-by-the-Water, who stood at her husband’s side, clutching Scratch’s arm. “This here’s for a very special father of the bride!”

“Brandy, eh?” Scratch growled. “You ain’t got no more hard likker buried in that hole under your bed?”

Meldrum brought the neck of the jug to his lips and bit down on the browned cork, quickly worrying it out of the top. Around the cork he said, “This here’s the finest I got. Never knowed you to pass up any alcohol, Titus Bass!”

“Shuddup an’ pour!”

When Meldrum had both of their cups halfway filled, he turned to Waits-by-the-Water and hoisted his tin, saying in Crow, “Here’s to the mother of the bride, who always has been one of the most beautiful women in all of Absaroka!”

“You still got a eye for the ladies, do ye?” Scratch roared, and then took a long drink of the thick and potent brandy, feeling its fiery burn coursing down the back of his throat.

Meldrum swallowed and bobbed his head from side to side, peering over the crowd. “My wife is here, somewhere. Over yonder—helping cut slices off that buffler. What I wanna know is—where that pretty daughter of your’n went. This child’s got a hankerin’ to kiss the bride!”

“She pretends she don’t mind getting a kiss from her dog-faced ol’ man, Meldrum!” Titus roared as he held his cup out for more brandy. “But I don’t think Magpie’s gonna want a thing to do with your hairy mug! Jehoshaphat, if you ain’t ’bout the ugliest man I ever knowed!”

“That puts me right next to you, Titus Bass!” he said as he hoisted his cup in toast again. “For you surely be the ugliest man I ever did see!”

Smacking his lips, Titus licked the tip of his tongue through the shaggy ends of his unkempt mustache, savoring every drop of the sweet fruit brandy the American Fur Company sneaked upriver only for the use of its post factors, but not in the robe trade itself. “Meldrum, you ol’ Scotsman,” Scratch grumbled, “you’re doin’ your damnedest to get me hooked on the company’s goddamned stuffed-shirt brandy!”

“What—you’re acquirin’ a taste for brandy, Titus Bass? Why, you ol’—”

“Mr. Meldrum!”

They both turned at the call, spotting one of the trader’s three employees riding toward them from the direction of their log-walled post. As the crowd stepped out of the way of the man’s horse, Titus spotted the five buckskinned riders close on the employee’s tail.

“Mr. Meldrum!”

The trader wiped his lips with the back of the same hand that held the cup, and his eyes narrowed on the newcomers as they approached. “What is it, James?”

“Visitors, sir! You got visitors from far away!”

By the time the six riders halted their horses several yards away, Scratch could see the five strangers weren’t Indians at all. Instead, they appeared to be French-blood half-breeds.

“Far away?” Meldrum asked as he took two steps closer to James.

Bass gently lowered his wife’s arm, then inched away from her so he could stay at the trader’s elbow.

“Fort LaRamee,” one of the strangers announced.

It suddenly struck him that Meldrum was an employee of the same company that Bordeau worked for down at Fort John on the North Platte—the site that was only now becoming better known as Fort Laramie. Quickly he peered at the faces of those five strangers, looking for a hint of someone familiar … perhaps one or more of them had been a part of that bunch who had tried to harm Magpie, who had made trouble for him and Shad Sweete back in the spring of ’47, bad blood more than four years gone now. If Bordeau had made it back to the post on his own hook, would he have carried a burning grudge this long? Finally tracking down Titus Bass and sending a handful of half-breed gunmen to kill the old trapper?

Meldrum demanded, “There’s trouble?”

With a shake of his head, the half-blood who had spoken waved his hand at the young white clerk. “Give him now.”

The employee reached inside his belt and pulled out a folded piece of foolscap about as big as a man’s palm. As he held it down to Meldrum, Titus saw it had been sealed with a huge dollop of dark blue wax, at the center of which was imprinted a seal. “Here, sir. This is what they brung for you.”

“When they get here?” Meldrum asked as he reached up to take the folded packet.

“Just now,” the young man explained. “Give me the note—but I didn’t want to open it. Brung it to you right away.”

“Good man,” he said, gazing down at the symbol hardened in the wax. “Who’s this from?”

Clearing his throat, the clerk said, “These here couriers said it’s very important, Mr. Meldrum. They’ve come all the way north from Fort Laramie, carrying this here letter from a man they called Fitzpatrick.”

Scratch took a step closer now, studying the dark, swarthy faces of those five strangers. That name of an old companion from their beaver days just did not fit into the scenario he was constructing with Bordeau tracking him all the way to Fort Alexander—

“Thomas? Thomas Fitzpatrick?” Meldrum asked.

The half-blood who had spoken before now nodded, echoing the name. “Oui, Thomas Fitzpatrick. He is … my booshway.”

The trader held his finger beneath the dollop of wax as he inquired, “Your booshway?”

“Hay-gent, In-gee-an hay-gent for all the mountains,” he said in a thick, barely understandable accent.

“If that don’t beat all,” Titus said with apparent relief that this special day would not be marred by the eruption of violence. “You hear that, Meldrum? Ol’ Broken Hand’s a’come the Injun agent out in these parts!”

“I heard tell of that last year, as I recollect,” the trader explained as he turned to the trapper. Then he looked back at the half-breed. “That ol’ white-headed boss of your’n sent this note to me?”

The half-breed nodded. “Is your name Meel-drum?”

“Close enough, it is.”

“Thomas Fitzpatrick write it for you,” the horseman declared. “You name on dis let-tair.”

Meldrum immediately turned over the folded paper. There it was, written in a strong hand.

Robert Meldrum, Trader to the Crow

Fort Alexander on the Yellowstone

He immediately flipped the folded paper over and dragged his index finger beneath the folds held down by that thick dollop of cracked and faded blue wax. Quickly he spread the paper with his hands, and his eyes danced over the neat swirls of ink made upon the foolscap. When he was done reading it in silence a third time, his lips moving soundlessly, Meldrum raised his eyes from the paper, gazing up at the older trapper.

“How you feel about making a journey with me, Titus Bass?”

He glanced at his wife, then asked, “What sort of journey?”

“South to Fort Laramie.”

“That’s where Fitzpatrick wrote you from?”

“Yes. You’ll come?”

“I … I dunno,” Scratch said. “Like I told you couple years back … last time I was there, I left ’thout good terms. Bordeau an’ some of his Frenchies—”

“That was long, long ago.” Meldrum interrupted. “I don’t even think Bordeau’s around anymore. ’Sides, you’ll be with me—I’m part of the company too.”

“Be with you?”

The trader nodded. “I want you to make this important journey with me.”

Despite Meldrum’s enthusiasm, it still didn’t sound all that good: the two of them riding off with these five half-breeds who might have been put up to some murder by an old antagonism. “Just you an’ me goin’?”

“Hell, no!” Meldrum exclaimed with his engaging smile, shaking that stiff sheet of wrinkled foolscap.

“I ain’t never trusted the Frenchies—”

“Them?” asked the trader. “They’ll be outnumbered all the way south.”

“Outnurnbered?”

He stuffed the paper inside his shirt and poured a little more brandy in their cups. “I’m s’posed to bring along the chiefs and headmen of the Crow nation: Pretty On Top, Flat Mouth, Falls Down, and young Stiff Arm, all of them comin’ with us. And more too.”

He wagged his head in deliberation, holding out his arm for his wife to come stand by his side. If the chiefs and headmen were coming along, then it made sense that his family could ride along with the delegation as well. Titus asked, “What in tarnation for?”

“Sounds of it, Fitzpatrick is callin’ in all the tribes to join him for talks at Laramie,” Meldrum said dramatically, patting the paper he had placed between the folds of his shirt. “Broken Hand says he’s gonna sit down with all them chiefs, and he’s gonna make ’em all smoke a pipe with their enemies.”

“Fitzpatrick figgers he’ll get all them war bands to make peace, one to the other?”

Meldrum nodded. “So I want you to come with the leaders of the Crow.”

Turning to Waits-by-the-Water, Scratch asked her, “You understand what Round Iron’s sayin’?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll go together?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

Turning back to the trader, grinning, he said, “Looks like we’ll go see for ourselves if ol’ Broken Hand gonna make a good peace with all them bad cases. Now, pour me some more of that there booshway’s brandy—I got me a wedding to celebrate!”

He didn’t awaken until the early afternoon of the following day, his head pounding like a hammer on an anvil as the sun finally slipped in beneath the bottom of the upturned lodge cover, making his flesh hot and causing his head to swim. When he eventually sat up and opened his eyes, Titus realized there wasn’t much left in the lodge. Someone had come and stolen most everything that belonged to his wife. His wife—

“Waits?”

She bent to her knees and stuck her head under the rolled-up lodge cover. “You are awake? How is your head?”

“Pounding like a drum,” he moaned, cradling his temples in both hands.

“Little wonder,” she scolded him in Crow. “You stayed up most of the night dancing and singing and pounding on any drum someone would loan you.”

“Don’t talk so loud,” he growled. “I can hear you just fine if you’d talk softer.”

“Go back to sleep until you feel better,” she said with a giggle. “I have too much work to get done before we leave for me to sit and argue with a drinker man—”

“Leave?”

“With Round Iron and the chiefs,” Waits reminded.

“Oh … right,” and he remembered foggily. “When?”

“Tomorrow at sunrise. Before then, I have to finish packing what we will take along for the children, and leave the rest with Magpie.”

“M-Magpie, yes.” He remembered her wedding too. And for some reason, that really saddened him. “She … doesn’t live with us anymore.”

“She has a husband, and they have their own lodge now.”

“Are they going with us?”

“No,” she answered. “Turns Back and those war chiefs staying behind are leading the people into the mountains—the Baby Place, Baah-puuo I-sa-wa-xaa-wuua, where there are the children’s footprints. They will find it cooler there, until autumn.”

“Right … the mountains,” he said as his head sank back onto the horsehair pillow. “The children’s footprint mountains, where the Little People live?”

“Yes. They might run into some of our holy friends, the Little People.”

Closing his eyes, Titus heard her shuffle off and felt himself drifting back into a blessed sleep. The idea of cool, shady mountains sounded damned good to him; at that moment he wasn’t so sure the air was moving at all. Heavy and hot. Maybe if he prayed right now the sacred Little People would answer by blowing with their breath, causing a breeze to drift down from their mountains that lay off to the southwest. He’d never seen one for himself, but the Crow steadfastly believed in these beings who were half human, half furry creature. Ever since the Apsaluuke people had come to this land from the Missouri River, they had been visited by the Little People. The beings came to heal the sick and wounded when the Crow healers could not. They came to protect the faithful who believed in them. And, they sometimes portrayed their sense of humor too—often making off with some small object or another that they took a liking to. From time to time a Crow man or woman might realize they were missing something shiny and explain that the Little People had taken it. Then, years later, they would find the missing object lying on a prominent rock, or hanging from a tree branch beside a well-used trail somewhere in those mystical “children’s footprint mountains,”^* always in plain sight where a shiny trinket would sparkle, catching the rays of the sun.

He tried to imagine what shape the creatures took, how they looked—because while every one of the Crow believed in the Little People, few, if any, had ever had themselves a good look at one of the mysterious and sacred creatures. Most times, the elders and prophets, seers and healers caught no more than a glimpse of the Little People out of the corner of their eyes. The hint of a shadow, the mere suggestion of fleeting movement … because the legends always told of the Little People doing their good in secret, away from the eyes of man.

Titus felt himself dreaming at last. Floating up the mountainside toward the cool and inviting darkness lit by a bright full moon and innumerable stars that seemed so close he felt he could reach out and tap each one, even set his big-brimmed hat right down on top of that gauzy, gibbous moon. He heard a rustling on either side of him and stopped, looking down to realize the horse that had been between his legs was somehow gone … and he was standing barefoot in the cool grass, the breeze nuzzling his long, graying hair. He turned to the side at the sounds of tiny feet scampering, but glimpsed only a half dozen shadows as they disappeared behind the trees.

From his right he heard more faint rustling and turned that way to look. All he saw was the tail end of some flickering movement as the creatures vanished before he ever saw them.

When he held his breath and concentrated, Titus heard the whispers. Straining into the black of that night, he listened intently, straining to make out the sounds. Voices, but not quite human. And the language they spoke … not anything he had ever heard spoken before in his fifty-seven winters on earth. For sure not American, but not Ute or Snake, Comanche or Crow either, not even what little Blackfoot or Mojave had fallen about his ears, and not a thing like Mexican talk.

Scratch took a deep breath and let half of it out, the same way he held a breath in his lungs when he was aiming his rifle … then listened some more, doing his best to recognize a word, some fragment of the foreign sounds.

These had to be Little People, he decided. For some reason, he knew he was the only human around these parts. Titus wasn’t sure why he felt so certain about that … but, after all, this was his dream. While the Crow could accept that they would never really see one of the creatures, Titus Bass wasn’t a Crow. He wanted to see one of them, talk to it—have the being talk with him, perhaps even show him some of their magic that so amazed generation after generation of the Apsaluuke people. Waits-by-the-Water and their children could believe in these holy beings out of hand, but Titus wanted to see for himself some of their notorious tricks and sleight of hand. The Crow had many long-held legends about Old Man Coyote—the well-known spiritual trickster … so maybe these sacred Little People had some tricks they could teach him.

“Come out here an’ lemme take a look at you.”

He heard a rustling to his left, then felt a brushing against the back of his leg. But as soon as he looked, it was gone.

“Stand still, so I can have me a good look afore you run away again.”

Scratch suddenly turned at more rustling, trying his best to catch a glimpse, for he was sure they were all around him at that very moment—and as soon as he had turned his head he felt as if something had trundled across his toes, the way a badger or porcupine might, had they not been such slow and lumbering creatures.

“Titus Bass.”

He understood that.

He grinned and said to the night, “You do speak American after all.”

“We talk so you understand us, yes,” the voice answered. “In the tongue of the listener.”

“Why won’t you show yourself to me?”

There was a pause while more leaves and branches rustled on all sides of him. Then the voice said, “We never show ourselves to you until you need us.”

Scratch smiled at that. “I need to see you, know you’re real an’ not just some dream of mine.”

“Dream? Why, you’re dreaming right now, aren’t you, Titus Bass?”

“Yep, s’pose I am.”

“Then—if this is your dream, you should realize this is very real,” the voice said as the rustling quieted.

He struggled to wrap his mind around that. Not since that night at Fort Bridger so many years ago had he given any thought to the two opposing worlds of unreality and dream, any thought to that unknown country where the two worlds converged, where they could ensnare a man into belief.

So he begged, “Why can’t you lemme see you?”

“Not till you need us,” the voice sounded soft, and only in his head, as if his ears weren’t hearing it. Instead, as if it were just inside his head all along. “Not till you really … need us badly.”

“When? When’s a man really need you badly?”

“Are you wounded?”

“No, I ain’t wounded.”

“Then you aren’t dying?”

“No,” he said testily. “I told you, I ain’t wounded an’ I ain’t dying.”

“Then why did you call us here to help you?” the voice sounded, edgy with anger. “We can’t understand why you’ve come here to this place and why you brought us here to help you.”

“Don’t you ’member: I’m dreaming this,” he reminded them. “I’m dreaming I was ridin’ up this mountain, into these here trees—when I thought I heard noise. I wasn’t thinking of you Little People, not thinkin’ ’bout your kind at all till I heard you movin’ around out there in the brush.”

He heard the immediate scampering of feet, untold numbers of feet, fading into the night.

“Wait!” he pleaded. “Don’t go!”

From farther away, this time certainly not within his head at all, the voice replied, “We have others to see to, Titus Bass. Ones who are in need of healing, people who are very ill—those who are dying—and the First Maker has sent us to find them because we are the only ones who can save them.”

“I ain’t sick … an’ I ain’t dyin’ neither,” he groaned. “I just wanted to get my own self a look at you.”

Now the voice whispered, so far away it was just barely audible. “You will see us one day, Titus Bass. But not until that day when there is nothing anyone can do to save you.”

“S-save me?”

“You will see us at last … on that day when you are prepared to die.”

^* The Pryor Mountains, in present-day south-central Montana.