Wind Walker

TWENTY-NINE

“Who the hell’s out there?” a harsh voice called from the night.

“That you, Jack?” Titus hollered, having shushed Bridger. He did not want Gabe announcing his presence to anyone now that Jim was a wanted man. “Uncle Jack?”

“Yep—who’s askin’?”

He located Robinson’s shadow blackened against the backdrop of starshine. “Titus Bass.”

“Why the hell you didn’t come on in, Titus?” Robinson said with some irritation.

But Scratch did not move. Instead, he stayed in hiding beside Bridger and asked, “Who else here with you, ’cept for your woman, Jack?”

“Wasn’t you down to Bridger’s post, Titus?” Jack hollered.

“I was, sometime back,” he answered, wanting to trust the old mountain man, who had squatted on Ham’s Fork even before Bridger and Vasquez built their post on Black’s Fork.

“Jim with you?”

“Why you askin’ that, Jack?” Bass demanded, suspicion squirming in his belly. “You see’d a bunch o’ Marmons come through day or two back?”

Robinson did not answer immediately. Rather, there arose the rustle of unseen movement, the crunch of sandy ground beneath rawhide moccasin soles.

“Scratch—it’s Shadrach. C’mon in—”

“Shad, you’re awright?”

“Big as life,” Sweete answered. “Bring your mangy face over.”

Before he did, Bass wanted to assure himself that Sweete didn’t have a Danite gun to his back. Maybe he should ask first to see just how Shad answered. “We heard trouble was headed your way at the ferry.”

“Mormons?” Sweete asked. “Damn if they didn’t hit us yesterday. The bastards got—”

That was enough proof for him. Titus scrambled to his feet, whistled into the night, then started for Robinson’s earthen dugout, hearing Flea whistle back to Bridger, who had stayed in hiding with the women and their children.

“Who’s that with you, Scratch?”

“I brung Gabe,” he answered as he started toward the two figures. “Our families got out of the post after Mary set them Saints to swillin’ down Jim’s whiskey like they’d never heer’d of Brigham Young’s temperance sermons at all.”

Shad embraced him quickly, and Robinson grabbed his wrist to shake. Then Titus started to ask, “Any more of the fellers get away from the crossin’—”

That’s when the figures came out of the brush, or bent low as they made their way through the low doorway of Robinson’s hut. He quickly counted six of them.

“This all?” Titus asked as he heard the hoofbeats and footsteps coming up behind him. Suddenly, he remembered, a panic rising in him as he asked, “Where’s Shell Woman? Your two young’uns, Shad?”

“They’re inside with Jack’s woman,” Sweete replied. “Good thing was, they was over here visitin’ when the Mormons come down on us. No tellin’ who’d got hurt, the way the bastards was shootin’ us up—”

“How many was up there with you, Shad?” Titus asked now. “How many workin’ when the sonsabitches come down on you boys?”

“Twelve, countin’ me,” Sweete admitted. “Them Mormons had us surrounded afore any of us got up in the mornin’. Kill’t the first one of us got out to take a piss. Shot down two more through that day. Night come an’ the rest of us we slipped off one at a time—every one of us makin’ tracks for Uncle Jack’s diggin’s.”

Bridger came up and embraced both Sweete and Robinson. Then he asked, “Them Saints shot three of my men?”

“Maybe more,” Shad replied. “Don’t know for sure. Only seven of us made it here—on foot.”

Titus had been working it on his fingers. He said, “That leaves two more what ain’t made it yet.”

“Likely dead,” Robinson advised sourly. “We been waiting for them shooters to show back up here to ambush the rest of us, way they did on the Seedskeedee.”

“Goddamned murderers!” Bass growled menacingly. “Five men murdered, Gabe! I tell you—we should let Washakie’s Snakes tear right on through them Marmon settlements, right on through their God-blessed Utah Territory, an’ be done with the lot of ’em. We can hang back, waitin’ for Brigham Young hisself to try sneakin’ out from the safety of his city … then we can be done with that evil son of a bitch—”

“We can’t do that,” Jim interrupted. “Not just yet.”

“How come they didn’t get their hands on you two?” Shad suddenly asked.

Titus snorted without a lick of humor, “Me an’ Gabe been hunted down by Diggers an’ Blackfoot, Sioux an’ Cheyenne. You wanna stand here an’ tell me you think some flatfooted Marmons gonna find Titus Bass or Jim Bridger in these hills?”

“Wouldn’t give ’em a snowflake’s chance in hell!” Robinson roared, setting the other old mountain men to laughing.

Sweete suggested, “With them Mormons come up to take the ferry outta our hands, maybe all the rest of us can move on down to your post an’ take it back. You got plenty of powder an’ lead for us to hold off—”

“There’s more’n a hunnert of the bastards still down there at Gabe’s fort,” Titus snarled. “Not countin’ the bunch ambushed you pilgrims, that’s still some ten-to-one odds agin us goin’ up agin them oily Marmons.”

After a moment of reflection, Shadrach wagged his head and laid a hand on Bridger’s shoulder. “What to do now, Gabe?”

“I ain’t for certain sure,” Bridger admitted, his face long and sad. “But somethin’ tells me I got to have a look at things down there on Black’s Fork.”

Titus could not believe his ears. “You mean—head back to your post where all them Marmons is waitin’ for you to show back up in that country?”

Resolutely, Jim nodded once. “I reckon I better see what’s become of them Saints, what they’re doin’ to what’s mine.”

“No tellin’ what’11 happen, they catch us out in the open, Gabe,” warned Shad.

“You can stay here, any of you,” Bridger suggested. “I ain’t askin’ you to come back with me to my post.”

“Your mind’s made up?” Titus inquired.

“This here’s my country,” Jim answered. “I was here long afore Brigham Young. So as long as the mountains is free, I’ll be here long after Brigham Young an’ his Saints is gone. Just as long as these here Rocky Mountains stay free—”

“I’ll ride with you, Jim,” Titus vowed as he stepped up to his old friend. “I’ll even ride with you to Salt Lake City so you can lay your hands on Brigham Young hisself. Don’t you ever doubt me, Jim Bridger. You can count on Titus Bass to ride into hell with you.”

Ghostly tendrils of gray smoke still rose from the half-burned timbers.

The valley of Black’s Fork stank, the late-summer air heavy with the stench of those smoldering piles of hides the Mormons had set ablaze.

But nowhere they looked as they slowly advanced on the blackened gates of Fort Bridger did they see a sign of life. Not one of Brigham Young’s Saints. Not a single horse or mule. Not even so much as a wagon or a milk cow left in the paddock of the corral.

“They cleared out, Jim,” Shadrach Sweete said as they all came to a halt at the edge of the cottonwood in the chill of that early morning.

“Appears to me them Marmons put great stock in what your Mary told ’em ’bout her papa bein’ Washakie, chief of the Snakes,” Titus observed. “I figger they woke up with their achin’ heads, an’ got to thinkin’ they didn’t have the stomach for fightin’ the Shoshone. Their kind allays gonna skeedaddle when they gotta fight men even up.”

Sweete said, “I bet they scared themselves, Jim. Once they found Mary gone, figgered she went off to fetch her pa an’ his warriors.”

Bridger said nothing but continued to wag his head as he started slowly toward the smoldering walls of what had been his peaceful bastion in the wilderness. An uneasy silence hung over the valley … not at all the sort of silence the man had settled here to enjoy. This was the utter lack of sound after a piece of ground had been gutted of all life. Not the twitter of a sparrow, the caw of a magpie, or the shriek of a robber jay. Only the occasional whisper of the breeze that kept the last of the embers glowing, their smoke rising, an oily-black stench filling their nostrils as they stopped at the open maw where the double gates had once hung. The charred ends of those timbers lay in a heap on which a small fortune in buffalo, bear, and other skins had been sacrificed to the flames of a bonfire.

A sudden creak made them all spin about, their hearts leaping to their throats … but it was only the dawn breeze nudging what was left of one half of the broken corral gate as it swung on a huge iron hinge. A lonely, forlorn sound. Where once this place had reverberated with life unleashed, now it felt like it was the empty pit of a man’s belly, gone hungry three days or more.

“You cache anything, Gabe?” Titus asked quietly as he stopped at Bridger’s elbow.

“No. Did you?”

Bass shook his head. “S’pose we ought’n look to see if the sonsabitches left anythin’ behind when they set fire to the place.”

Jim sighed, his face long and gray with despair. At least half of every low hut was burned, the logs tumbled to the ground, charred and smoking. About a third of the outer stockade still stood, but the rest had burned nearly to the scorched earth, both the walls around the fort itself and the adjacent corral.

“The wagons’re gone,” Bridger said. “No sign they burned ’em.”

“They took them too,” Sweete declared.

“After they loaded ’em with ever’thing they wasn’t gonna burn,” Jim growled, a fury finally beginning to glow behind his eyes. “After they stole ever’thing right out from under me for Brigham Young.”

“This ain’t right,” Jack Robinson said in a weak voice. “This just ain’t right. Even if they said they come to arrest you for sellin’ weapons to the Injuns … it ain’t right they just up an’ steal ever’thing from you an’ your family.”

“From me an’ my family too,” Titus reminded him.

Robinson muttered, “Stealin’ an’ murder ain’t right—”

“These folks ain’t like you an’ me, Uncle Jack,” Titus interrupted. “Ever’thing these Marmons do agin us an’ our kind … why, they figger it’s the work of their god and his awmighty prophet, Brigham Young.”

“Damn Brigham Young!” Bridger shrieked. “I give him my hand. I offered to guide his people down to a valley where they could settle in peace an’ grow their crops an’ no one’d ever bother ’em again! The night I took supper with that bastard Prophet, he told me he an’ his people was runnin’ from folks what wanted to hang him, folks what wanted to kill all his faithful believers.”

Jim turned to his friends, tears of frustration and rage pooling in his eyes. “Can you believe I was took in by the son of a bitch? Here I was gonna do all I could to help him an’ his folks who he said just wanted a place of their own to live out their lives an’ believe the way they wanted to believe … an’ Brigham Young puts a butcher knife atween my shoulders!”

“You just say it,” Titus offered. “I’ll ride with you to the valley of the Salt Lake so you can strangle that evil son of a bitch with your own bare hands, Gabe.”

“Th-there ain’t near ’nough of us no more,” Bridger said quietly. “Time was, we could ride out in the four directions an’ be back inside of two weeks with more’n a hunnert … likely two hunnert trappers. Time was we could’ve rid right down on Salt Lake City an’ dragged Brigham Young out of his house—quakin’ an’ shudderin’ an’ blubberin’ for me to spare ’im before we dropped a rawhide rope round his fat preacher’s neck … but not no more.”

“There ain’t a hunnert of our kind in these mountains anymore,” Titus declared. “Ain’t nowhere near half that many, not all the way from the Marias on the north to Taos an’ Santy Fee on the south. Them what ain’t gone west to Oregon like Meek an’ Newell, or run back east to what they used to be … the rest is standin’ right here with us.” He swept his arms around the group. “Lookit us, fellas. Just lookit us. We’re all that’s left of a glory breed … an’ ever’ last one of us is barely hangin’ on to what was by our fingernails.”

Slowly the handful of men drifted off in different directions, not one of them uttering another word, each of them wallowing in his own thoughts, recollections, memories of a brighter day, shining times when they were still kings of this mountain empire, before the big fur companies choked the very life out of the beaver trade … long, long before the settlers’ wheels cut through the heart of these mountains. Long, long before these self-anointed Saints came to murder, plunder, and steal everything worth living for.

Funny, Titus thought as he and Waits-by-the-Water walked arm in arm toward the smoldering log hut near the southeastern corner of the stockade, the one that Bridger had turned over to them, but that night back in ’47 when Gabe had supper alone with Brigham Young by the crossing of the Sandy, the Prophet had swayed Jim with tales of how the Saints had been persecuted by the majority of folks wherever they had attempted to build their temples and live out their lives according to the dictates of their holy leader. Funnier still it was, now that Brigham Young’s Saints had come to this land and through the sheer strength of their numbers had become the majority for the first time in the history of their church.

But what did these Saints do when they finally found themselves totally powerful over others already living in these free mountains? Did they let those other folks be, let others live their lives according to their own beliefs? No—Brigham Young’s holy, self-righteous people turned out to be murderers and thieves even worse than those who had hounded the Mormons out of every city back east … for the Saints committed their evil, stole from Gentiles, staining their hands with the blood of innocents—all in the name of their gods!

There wasn’t much of anything the Mormons had left behind. They had plundered everything of any value: blankets, clothing, weapons, cooking vessels stolen from every hut. And what they hadn’t loaded up on Bridger’s wagons before heading south for Salt Lake City, they had destroyed. Waits bent to pick up the remains of a brass kettle, smashed in half by the butt of a rifle or the heel of a boot, then stabbed with a bayonet until it could never be used again.

All that he and his woman had managed to acquire over twenty years together was gone in one fit of murderous thievery. Even when the Blackfoot, Sioux, or Cheyenne had raided, none of those tribes had ever completely stripped Titus Bass of everything. He gazed around, his heart aching and his eyes stinging with bitter tears. All it seemed they had left were their children—

Waits-by-the-Water suddenly hunched over in a spasm of pain, huffing loudly.

“Mary!” he cried from the ruins of what had been their little cabin as he threw his arms around his trembling wife. Sensing the volcanic quake shudder through Waits-by-the-Water, he hollered again, with even more urgency. “Shell Woman! Mary! Someone, come help us!”

Titus heard the footsteps pounding up behind them. Still holding her tightly against him as she caught her breath, her knees gone watery, Scratch peered back over his shoulder from the charred ruins, finding their children frozen in place, their wide eyes locked on their mother. Jim and his wife ran up and ground to a halt with Toote and Shad, the smoking timbers staining the air.

Seeing that frightened look in Mary’s eyes, Scratch realized the woman knew what they were up against.

Quietly, calmly supporting his trembling wife, Titus Bass said, “Mary—we’re gonna need your help. This baby’s comin’ too early.”

He had asked Waits-by-the-Water if she wanted to come with him, but he knew that no matter how strong she was, she still was in no condition to straddle a horse.

He could have cut some saplings and tied together some sort of travois to carry her in … if she had wanted to go along with him into the hills.

But she had shaken her head, bit down on her lower lip almost hard enough to draw blood to keep from crying out loud, and buried her face against him until it was time for him to go. Alone.

They didn’t have much they could do for a proper burial shroud, what with the Mormons stealing most everything and burning what they didn’t take with them when they cleared out of the valley. But Jim Bridger did manage to find some scraps of flour sacks his wife, Mary, and Shell Woman quickly stitched together with some delicate and narrow leather whangs until they had a piece of coarse burlap big enough to wrap twice round the tiny corpse. Into this mourning sack they sewed the infant, this one and only garment the child would wear on this earthly veil. Soon enough, he thought as Gabe helped his wife with those stitches, soon enough the burlap would fall to tatters beneath the howling winds of this coming winter … then the tiny body would begin to go the way of all flesh. Back to dust, set upon the winds for all time to come.

When the little bundle was ready, Jim came over and nodded, then turned away. Neither he nor Shad had been able to say anything, their grief was so palpable.

“I will go now,” he said to her as the fire’s light flickered on the sheen across her wet cheeks.

“Say the prayers,” she begged him in Crow.

She didn’t have to. “I know the prayers to say. Through the seasons, I have said the words over so many. Over your father, and your brother too. These same prayers we both said over the grave of my grandson. And finally … the words spoken over the body of your mother too.”

“Wh-why?” she whimpered again, grinding her face into his shirt. “Did we do something wrong to bring all this pain? Is there something we could have done to change this—”

Pressing two fingertips against her lips, Titus reassured her with words he did not yet believe, “This is not about us—not about what we did or what we didn’t do.”

“How can this be about that little man who died coming too early?” she asked in a husky whisper, her throat sore from the hours of hard breathing and the difficult labor.

“It isn’t about our son either,” he said. “It’s about whoever makes these choices. Who decides what’s to live … and what’s to die.”

“Will we ever know?”

He squeezed her shoulders against him for a long time, then finally said, “If we’re lucky, we might figure it out one day. But … I don’t think we ever will know why it was us, why it was here and now … why it was that little boy of ours.”

She sobbed for several more minutes; then her trembling slowed until she finally pushed herself back from him enough to gaze up at her husband’s eyes. Waits said, “Make it a safe place for him who has no name. Make it a very, very safe place.”

He leaned down and kissed her on the forehead, right where her hair began, and drank in the fragrance of her, then slowly peeled himself out from under his wife and stood. Without a word he passed by his children and went to untie the reins to his horse.

As Scratch put his left moccasin into the big hole of the cottonwood stirrup, he stopped, stood still, feeling so damned weary. Then without turning to look back over his shoulder, he said, “Flea, I want you to bring me the body of your little brother.”

With great effort, Titus dragged himself into the saddle, settled himself down, and toed his right foot into the stirrup as the tall, muscular Flea took the tiny bundle from Shell Woman’s arms and brought it over to where his father sat on the horse.

“I can come with you, Popo.”

His eyes were wet, tears falling down his leathery cheeks as Flea laid the burlap shroud across the crook of his left arm. “You stay with your mother. Sit with her. Do anything she needs of you. I … I must do this alone.”

Not able to choke out anything more, Titus Bass dragged the reins to the right and heeled the horse in a quarter turn. The animal slowly carried him away from the smoking rubble that remained of Fort Bridger on Black’s Fork in the valley of the Seedskeedee. The stars were still in bloom early that morning as the sky began to gray in the east. Just the faintest hint of rose at one spot on the horizon. A reddening, deepening, bloody rose that so reminded him of the smears running up and down the newborn’s body, of that blackening pool of blood there beneath his wife’s buttocks as her legs quivered in pain and exhaustion while she delivered the tiny lifeless body.

The boy had never breathed.

Scratch let out a long sigh, watching the thin, gauzy wisp of breathsmoke trail from his mouth as he began to sob again. This tiny son of his had never taken a breath, never known the simple joy of tasting life in his lungs.

First Maker breathed His spirit into each of us, he thought as he started the horse upstream toward the lion’s head rocks where he and Gabe had waited out the Mormons’ sacking of the fort. So it was the Indians of these mountains believed. The Creator of all blew His breath into the mouth and nostrils of every newborn at the moment of emerging into the world so that the child gasped with the powerful spirit that infused the tiny lungs and made the babe cry out with life.

But where had the First Maker been for this child he clutched, here in the crook of his left arm, just beneath his broken heart? Where was this all-powerful Creator, this Grandfather Above, whose place it was to watch over the tiniest and most helpless of creatures? Where had the First Maker been when Mary and Toote sat staring down at the child’s lifeless, blue-tinged body, lying limp across Shell Woman’s arms until Bass desperately shouldered Mary aside and took the child into his own hands, pressed his open mouth over its tiny nose and lips … where had the Creator been as he desperately fed his tiny son the breath from his own body?

With that one hand gently laid on the babe’s chest, Titus had felt each of his breaths make the tiny chest rise. After each attempt, Scratch had stared down into the wrinkled face, looking for some flicker of the eyelids, some cough and sputter, some bawling response as the legs and arms would start to flail … but instead his child lay still and lifeless, no matter how he breathed into its lungs or rubbed its cold, blue body. So helpless, so goddamned helpless as he had started to sob, his tears spilling to mingle with the thick, milky, blood-streaked substance smeared all over the limp newborn.

Titus had pressed the tiny body against him as his head fell back and he let out a primal wail that shook him to his very roots. As he rocked and rocked and rocked there by his wife’s knees, Waits-by-the-Water cried, clutching Mary and Shell Woman, clawing at their arms in grief, finally burying her face in the Shoshone woman’s lap. Finally Bridger came up and knelt beside him, put his arm around Bass’s shoulder.

“Let me take ’im, Scratch. I’ll hol’t ’im for a while.”

“No,” he had growled, like a wounded animal with its paw caught in the jaws of a trap—hurting, angry, and preparing to chew off his own foot to free himself.

But this was not the sort of pain he could swallow down and be shet of it. No bloody chewing through the gristle and bone, fur and sinew, would make this loss any better.

“G-get me something to bury the boy in, Gabe. Just you do that.”

Bridger had risen there beside him and moved with Shadrach off to locate the charred pieces of those once-used flour sacks. He had brought them back and showed them to Mary and Toote. When Titus nodded that they would do, the two women had slowly inched away from Waits while Scratch went to sit at his wife’s shoulder. Propping her against him, Bass laid their stillborn son in her arms and rocked them both in his.

“Day’s comin’,” Bridger said before he turned away with Shad and the women to see to the burial shroud and to give them privacy. “Couple hours, maybe three at the most.”

“I’ll go when you’re done wrappin’ the boy up,” Titus whispered.

“What if it’s still dark out there?”

“Even if it’s dark, Gabe. I’m gonna do this right by the child.”

Holding her, embracing both of them, from time to time he asked Flea to bring in some more firewood. Waits-by-the-Water felt as cold to him as the tiny stillborn. He knew she had to be freezing, shaking the way she was. Just keep the fire going so she did not die on him too. He didn’t know what he would do if that happened … couldn’t possibly go on without her. Wouldn’t even want to go on without her, even if he could.

Strange now that the light of a new day was coming, brightening out of the east at his back, even though he felt his own spirit withering, shriveling, darkening like a strip of rawhide left out in the elements to dry and twist and blacken. Should have been that he went to bury this little body after dark, with the coming of night instead of the start of a whole new day. The way life had of giving a man a new chance all over again every dawn.

Miles upstream on the far side of the rocky outcrop, he found the tree that had several high, thick branches. Titus dismounted below its rustling leaves touched with a gentle breath of breeze every now and then. He shuddered once at a chill gust, pulling the flaps of the old, stained blanket capote together. This was always the time of day when it was coldest, just as the sun was deciding to raise its head into this gray world of little color and contrast. Sitting there, still and silent except for the occasional snort of the pony, or the creak of cold saddle leather beneath him, Bass listened to the wind sough through the leaves of that tree—wondering why the wind blew now, this holy breath of the First Maker … wondering why that life-giving breath of the All Spirit had not entered his son’s mouth.

Damn, but he didn’t want to grow bitter. Not here and now holding this boy’s tiny body. Not when it came time for a father to do the only thing a father could for his stillborn son. He did not want to get hard and crossways with the First Maker, not now because in the last handful of years he had been sensing more and more that spirit breath move through him as it never had before. Maybe only because he was getting older. Maybe most everything he’d cared about before just didn’t matter anymore, while some things meant more than they ever had in his life.

No, he did not want to become embittered, even though he so convinced himself that he possessed the power of that spirit in his own lungs that he could breathe its wind from his body into the lungs of his infant son, giving the stillborn babe a breath of his own spirit wind. But he had found himself helpless in the face of death. Every bit as helpless as he was in understanding why the First Maker had refused to save the baby. And Lucas too. Why had young life been snuffed out in its innocence … when men like Brigham Young and their evil flourished?

But, that wasn’t for him to know, was it? Not … just yet.

Titus kicked his right foot free, gripped the round saddlehorn, and slid down from the horse’s back. A gust of wind tugged at his long, gray hair, nudging that single, narrow braid he always wore—and carried a moan to his ear. An eerie, melancholy sound strangely like the final sigh a man makes as the last air in his lungs comes whispering out in a death rattle. Drawn by that moan’s direction, he turned slightly, made to look at the high slope of loose talus that had torn itself away from the foot of the rocky cliff. Jagged seams and fissures streaked down from the top of that ridge.

One of them would be the most fitting place for the tiny bundle.

Turning back to his pony, he untied the short length of buffalo-hair rope looped at the front of his saddle, laid the shroud on the ground, and quickly knotted together a sling so that he could carry his son on his back. He stood and studied the slope covered with sage and juniper, scattered with loose rock and talus shale, knowing he would have to use both hands to make the climb if he was ever going to reach the crack he had selected, that fissure where the wind would enter at the top of the ridge, moan down the entire length of the crack, then whisper out at the bottom, making the sound of some language he did not understand. But a sound that continued to call to him nonetheless.

Planting his foot for that first step, he immediately slid back down. Clawing with his hands, he managed to hold on for the most part, but as he made a little ground, he always seemed to slide back, losing more than half of what he had gained. Eventually he found that if he kept himself low, digging in with his toes and crabbing up on his knees, he didn’t lose so much. The sun was beginning to warm the air, and he had begun to sweat inside the blanket coat by the time he reached the bottom of the narrow fissure. There on a ledge less than six inches wide he set a knee, dug in the heel of the other moccasin, and balanced himself as he turned slightly, slowly slipping his arms free of the rope loops.

For a long, long time he cradled the body against him and let the tears flow as the sobs wracked his body with spasms. As the sun emerged from hiding, he eventually blinked to clear his eyes and turned to peer over his shoulder at the coming sun. The very top of that bright, glowing orb was spraying the horizon with a luminous, orange iridescence. Scratch turned back, pivoting on that one knee, and raised the bundle toward the crack in the rocks.

Turning the tiny body sideways, he managed to get the infant back more than a foot, as deep as his elbow. When it would go no farther, he quit nudging and pulled the arm out of the fissure. As his left hand clutched a fingerhold in a nearby seam, Titus leaned over and grabbed hold of the first of the loose rocks around him, one no bigger than his own hand. He stuffed it into the fissure. Then another. Again and again he shoved loose rocks in after the burlap shroud, pounding each one in with the succeeding rock so they wouldn’t easily come loose with freezing and thawing, freezing and thawing across untold seasons. Finally he had all the rocks the fissure could hold.

He had buried his son within the folds of the earth, here in these free mountains.

Sweating with the heat of the rising sun, Bass pulled one arm, then the other, free of the coat, and flung it down the slope. It made him too damn hot and, besides, he might trip himself on its long tails as he slowly inched his way back down the treacherous slope of loose talus.

Sighing, he turned and closed his eyes, letting himself feel the warmth of the sun as it pressed its light against his face. A feeling came over him as the wind moved through his hair. But he regretted that he didn’t have a whistle. Not a whistle carved from the wingbone of an eagle and wrapped with colorful porcupine quillwork the likes of the one he had taken off that dead Blackfoot warrior, then hung around the neck of the dead man’s younger brother. No matter, he thought.

Wetting his parched lips with his tongue, Scratch began to whistle—doing his best to imitate the shrill cry of a diving hawk on the wing. Then making his best rendition of a sound he had heard ten thousand times in these mountains: the harsh call of the golden eagle. A war cry. A high, sliding screech that he laid upon the wind as his offering for this stillborn child. Nothing more than his lips, and his prayers.

That’s all he could offer the boy now. Prayers for a child who would never learn to crawl or toddle, for a boy who would never learn to run and ride, for the man who would never hunt or fight enemies alongside his old man. This child who would never become a warrior, protecting his woman and their children …

And that made him sob all the harder, making it nearly impossible for him to raise that whistle as an offering to the wind.

Then he swallowed down the pain, shoving it as far into his belly as he could so he could whistle loudly as the sun baked him and the insects began to whir in the brush below at the base of the slope. Each time he raised the shrill cry, he felt a little better … until he fell silent and dried his eyes.

Titus turned and faced the fissure once more, kissed his fingertips, then laid his hand on those rocks he had hammered in upon the tiny body. That last good-bye said, the father began to slide down the slope, yard by yard, reaching the blanket capote and dragging it with him as he descended to the brush and dry grass. Rolling up the coat as he stepped over to the pony, Scratch tied it behind his saddle, stuffed a foot in the stirrup, and swung up for the ride back to the gutted, half-burned ruins of Fort Bridger and his wife.

She would likely be about as empty as Gabe’s plundered post. Waits needed him. He needed her. Together they would have to sort through the why of this.

What to do now, and where to go … and how would he convince Waits to go on?

She was waiting for him when he came out of the trees at the edge of the far meadow. His wife was sitting against a section of the corral wall the Mormons hadn’t burned down. He knew it was her, the way Jackrabbit sat on one side of his mother, little Crane in her mother’s lap. And standing guard over them all was his eldest son, Flea. The tall, sinewy young man waited with his shoulders back, his pony’s reins in one hand, Scratch’s long flintlock in the other—watching his father approach from the southwest across the open ground.

The summer wind moved through Flea’s unbound hair, whipping it across his face, as the youth turned to the side and his mouth moved. Titus could not hear the words at this distance, but in a moment Bridger appeared at the sundered gate. Behind him came Shadrach and their families. With them the last of Bridger’s ferry workers came to stand. They all waited in silence as Flea and Gabe helped Waits-by-the-Water to her feet. No one moved as Scratch drew near, reined back, and let his eyes touch each face.

Gazing down at his wife, he said, “It’s done.”

Bridger said, “I’m goin’ to Laramie, Scratch.”

His eyes moved to Gabe’s face. “What you decided on doin’?”

“Maybeso them soldiers will help,” Jim sighed.

“Help you do what?”

“Go after them Saints in the Salt Lake Valley.”

Titus wagged his head. “I told you I’d ride with you, Gabe. But them soldiers ain’t gonna be wuth a red piss to us.”

“What you think I ought’n do?”

“Do what folks in these mountains allays done,” Titus said as he slid from the saddle. “You gather round you them what you can count on—then go to right the wrong what’s been done to you.”

For a moment, it appeared Bridger didn’t understand, but he eventually said, “You figger I ought’n find Washakie?”

“Yep. He can put his warriors on the trail behind us, fightin’ men what them Marmons can’t never stop.”

But Bridger stared at the ground for some time before he looked up at Bass again and said, “That means I’d be startin’ a Injun war, Scratch.”

“No, the way I see it, them Marmons started the war on you,” he snarled. “You’d just be finishin’ what they was goddamned fools enough to start by takin’ ever’thing from you but your life an’ your family.”

Gray-faced, Bridger finally said, “I’ll go on over to Laramie. Give them soldiers a chance to help me, or turn me down.”

“An’ when they turn you down,” Titus asked, “what then?”

“We come down to playin’ our hand,” Jim said, then paused. “You an’ me gonna see about makin’ Brigham Young pay for what his Saints done to us an’ our families.”