Wind Walker

THIRTY-FOUR

He watched the young warrior trudge down the snowy slope until he could not see the figure anymore for the swirling snow that swept in upon gusts of cold wind.

Cold.

How he wished he could spend one more warm night with her. Just holding her, not even taking her in a fevered, frantic rush. Just to cradle her against him one more night. To lie there feeling her heart beating against him, listening to the soft breathing of their children in their lodge until the sky at the top of the poles turned gray and a new day was a’born. What he wouldn’t give to feel her arms around him one last night.

But it was too late now. So cold. Even his warm gut was starting to freeze in his hands.

The snow stung his eyes, sharp against his wet cheeks where his tears had fallen. So he closed them, wondering how he would ever have the strength to blow now that he was growing weaker and weaker. He didn’t have enough will left in him—

With a soft rustle of movement, he felt them approach, brushing against him on both sides.

Slowly Titus opened his eyes, blinked to be sure. And saw them. The Little People. And gradually the realization of what that meant made his throat go dry.

One of them, almost completely covered with long, unkempt gray hair, leaned close to his face and whispered, “You see us, old friend?”

“Yes, I … I finally see you.” He thought the words in his mind, his front teeth still clamped around the end of that whistle.

The Little Person smiled warmly, then peered down the old man’s frame as he asked, “Do you remember what I told you long ago about when the time came that you would finally see us?”

Titus nodded, weakly.

“Do you feel pain?”

Bass nodded again.

The leader made a simple gesture, and his four companions came up to stand around the old man. They reached out with their tiny, hairy hands. Without warning, two of them slapped him on the soles of his feet, hard. One of the others gently laid his hands over the gaping belly wound, and the fourth spread his fingers over the bullet hole in his chest.

“Now—is there any pain?”

He shook his head, struck with wonder, bewildered by the magic. The immense, bone-numbing cold was still there, so icy he had never experienced anything close to it. But … no more did he suffer the pain.

“Then we have done all we can for you, old friend,” the leader said softly as his four companions stepped behind him. “Do you remember what your Blackfoot helper said before he left you to do the rest on your own?”

He remembered.

“Good. We are going away too. Now you must do what remains for yourself. Close your eyes and make your prayer.”

Without attempting to speak, he let his eyelids fall. And with his total being concentrated on struggling to draw one last, ragged, liquid breath deep within his shredded lungs. There it was! Such warmth that he wanted to sing out in victory, to cry out in joy. Lo, those many years, the countless seasons he had taken for granted this simple act of breathing. And only now, at the end, learning that the First Maker, his Creator who had given him his first breath as a newborn, was now asking him to utter one last prayer with his final breath.

“Pray for what is most dear in your heart, Wind Walker.”

The young Blackfoot’s words rang in his head.

And he felt that warmth from his chest rising into his throat, at the back of his tongue, one last gush of immense joy and gratitude for all that had been given him in his life, feeling the hot tears seeping between his eyelids he had clenched against the snowy, icy blasts of cold … that final prayer entered the whistle. Shrill and high.

An eagle’s cry of victory as it leaped from the wingbone, into the air, rising … rising … rising through the terrible cold … far, far higher still.

For the longest time he sat there, the tears frozen on his cheeks, conscious of how the cold was gradually diminishing. Knowing that if he weren’t already dead, he soon would be. After all, Titus reasoned, he no longer sensed the bone-jarring temperature, nor the insistent tug of the wind at his hair and flesh. Even the rock-hard trunk of the tree he leaned against no longer mattered—

Then, just when he wasn’t so sure what had happened to him, Scratch sensed what felt like warm breath against his face, heard the gentle call of a Steller’s jay as it rose in flight—so clear and distinct he could hear every flap of its wings.

Afraid his eyes would be frozen shut, Bass slowly opened them, but no more than slits because of the bright light illuminating the meadow before him. No winter scene … instead, what he saw was a sunlight benediction rained down upon a green, grassy beaver meadow ringed by jack pine and aspen, fragrant cedar and aromatic sage. Shadows dappled the far edge of that glen where sunlight shot through the leafy branches in a complex tapestry of color … enough to convince him it was no longer winter. He wasn’t cold anymore. And suddenly he realized he wasn’t alone.

At first he thought it was the Little People who had come to take away the pain from his dying, perhaps they who had created this dream for him. Because, he remembered with a sudden reckoning, that dream was in fact reality all along. If he had taken all those years in these high and majestic places to learn anything … it was that most simple fact that his dreams would always be more real than anything he had ever experienced.

Wanting to speak, Titus pushed his tongue against the wingbone whistle. But his lips were so dry they had fused together. So he reached up and gently pulled the whistle free. Licked his lips, and let the whistle lay against his chest. That’s when he looked down and noticed the blood. He’d been wounded many times before—knives and lead balls and arrows too—but never before had he seen so much of his own blood. Wallowing in it by the time the young Blackfoot got him dragged up this slope, to this shady stand of trees overlooking the beaver meadow …

But, while the blood still soaked his shirt and leggings, brownish, blackened stains smeared up and down the middle of him, when he slowly raised his two arms away from his belly to inspect himself, there was no wound, no coil of torn and twisted gut. Bewildered, he moved the whistle aside and stared down at the chest wound. A blood-ringed hole in the middle of his buckskin shirt. But when he gently probed with a finger through that hole, he encountered no wound.

The Little People could tell him. There they were! Across the meadow in the streaks of sunlight and shadow streaming through those beckoning quakies. A beaver gave a warning slap with its tail, then slipped beneath the placid surface of the pond reflecting the aching blue of the sky overhead.

“I hear you!” he said, surprising himself with how strong his voice had become after being so weak, feeling so drained, so damned empty for so long. “C’mon out—I got a few more questions for you—”

But he cut off his call in midsentence as the shadow became figure and stepped into the edge of the light, moved down the emerald bank, and came to a stop at the grassy edge of the uncluttered pond.

“Titus!”

“Y-yes,” he answered, his throat seizing in wonder as he recognized the man from the distant past. “That r-really you?”

“Cap’n Ebenezer Zane!” the man cried out, standing every bit as tall and bold as that day back in 1810 when he had waved aboard a gangly young lad from the Kentucky shore of the Ohio River, inviting him onto a flatboat loaded with goods bound for New Orleans, beckoning him to take that first leap into a lifetime of adventures where there would be no looking back.

“H-how you here … ?”

“Don’t you worry none ’bout that now, young Titus,” Zane called. “I was sent to bring you along, son. It’s your time now … time to come with us.”

“Us?”

Zane turned slightly, took a step back to the line of quakies that whispered, quietly rattling with the warm breeze that barely ruffled the surface of the beaver pond. The old flatboat pilot made one simple gesture with his wrist.

Another tree’s shadow blurred, taking shape as it inched into the sunlight. Striding down the hill to join Zane came Isaac Washburn, straight as a ramrod and fit as a freshly oiled square-jawed beaver trap.

“Hyar, ye boy! I see’d you made it to them Shinin’ Mountains I tol’t you of!” he called out with a wave across the meadow.

Titus rolled onto his hip, not sure if he could believe both of them being here. “I-I done it ’cause of what you told me, Gut,” he said, his voice catching as he used the old mountaineer’s handle. And felt the first of the warm tears begin to pool in his eyes.

“Nawww,” Washburn protested with a bright smile that lit up his teeth the color of pin acorns, “you done it for your own self, Titus Bass. The way you was meant to all along.”

He cleared the lump in his throat and called across the meadow, “You both come to fetch me, did you?”

“Me too,” a new voice called as the shadow pulled itself away from the stand of aspen.

For a moment Titus sat right there, frozen and unable to move as he stared at Jack Hatcher, who stomped up between Washburn and Zane, looking hale and hearty and every bit as fit as that newly strung fiddle he raised up to the hollow of his shoulder.

“I come along to play us some of the ol’ songs, Scratch,” he cried out. “Ever’ journey must have its music, ol’t friend!”

“Never was much of a singer,” Titus admitted as he started to rise to his feet.

“Neither was I,” the new figure announced as it stepped into the meadow, hair the brilliant white of a newly born cloud. “But there was many a time I wished I could have sung, my heart was so filled with joy to find a friend like you.”

“Asa? Jehoshaphat, if that ain’t really you!”

McAfferty came up beside Hatcher, pounded Jack on the shoulder with his one hand, and said, “Maybe now’s the time you play a li’l music for this’un been a long, long time gettin’ into camp.”

Drawing his ratty bow across the strings, Jack kicked off a light and merry tune, something Scratch knew he should recognize from long, long ago.

“If you won’t sing,” a new accent cried out as the shadow tore itself away from the copse of trees, “I sure will. You always told me it was my songs kept you from growing sore afraid on that trip we made down the mighty Columbia!”

The big man could be no one else. “J-Jarrell! I heard the ague laid you down.”

Thornbrugh, the English-born former seaman who had finished out his life with the Hudson’s Bay Company, came up to join the group, stomping his foot and clapping his hands. “This fiddler doesn’t play so bad for being American!”

“C’mon, Titus!” Zane cheered.

Washburn waved him over, saying, “Come join the hurraw!”

As the notes from Hatcher’s fiddle filled that meadow, more shadows now stepped away from the trees, taking form only when they emerged into the sunlight. His old friend Arapooesh, legendary chief of the Crow. And at his elbow came Whistler, Scratch’s own father-in-law. At his side walked Whistler’s tall and handsome son, Strikes In Camp. When the three warriors moved up, the white men opened their tiny crescent, enlarging it once more.

“W-Whistler!” he croaked, his voice breaking with sentiment, his eyes filling with tears. Seeing the man made him want to hope all the more. Oh, how he had prayed with that last and final breath.

“Yes, my son—you have a question?”

“Whistler, have … have you seen her?”

“Who is it you ask for?”

“W-Waits …” But suddenly he remembered that proper manners dictated that he wasn’t supposed to speak the name of one who had died. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t use your names any longer—”

“That is not important now, Pote Ani,” Whistler responded with amused kindness. “Who do you wish most to see?”

“My wife … the only woman I truly loved in all my life.”

Strikes In Camp turned to his right and gestured to the line of quakies. A small figure stepped from the shadows, taking form as if emerging from beneath the surface of that beaver pond. Short, and towheaded, looking every bit like his mother—

“Lucas?” he cried as he finally lunged a step forward.

But instead of answering, the young child stopped right at that edge of the light, stretched out his little hand, reaching back into the shadows as Jack’s fiddle sang so sweetly the notes of a gentle lullaby.

As Titus watched, slack-jawed and numbed with wonder, he saw her take shape, slipping her long-fingered hand between Lucas’s little fingers. Into that edge of sunlight she came, dressed in a brilliant dress of doeskin, even more finely made than the one she had worn the day they gave their vows to one another. And cradled across her other arm …

In his heart Scratch knew.

And instantly started forward, stumbling at first, for his legs were so long without movement. Careening forward, he trudged faster and faster, skirting around the edge of that tranquil blue beaver pond.

Titus knew who Waits held in her arm as she walked beside the grinning boy, clutching Lucas’s little hand, both of them slowly moving toward him while that crowd of old friends whooped and clapped, sang out their war song or some off-key ditty of an old tune their mam had soothed them to sleep with back in those days when there hadn’t been a care in their world.

Titus shuddered to a stop the moment he glimpsed the infant’s face, so like Waits-by-the-Water’s: with her big round eyes and those high cheeks blushed with copper. Hair more brown than black, wavy too, like his father’s.

As he stared dumbfounded at the babe, Lucas said in a whisper, “It’s your li’l boy, Gran’papa. Now you an’ me gonna teach him ever’thing … one day soon, ain’t we?”

The old friends and compatriots were swallowing him up of a sudden, their hands reaching out to touch him at long last over the years, tousle his hair, slap him on the back, and pound him on the shoulder. Finally she took another step forward and reached him herself, laying her damp cheek against his breast.

“Your friends,” she whispered to him, “they told me I wouldn’t have to wait for you very long. They said you always kept your promise—especially the last promise you made to meet me here on the mountaintop.”

His heart filling with joy as he wrapped his arms around her and raised his face to the sky, whispering his utter thanks … Titus knew he had made it to the mountaintop at last.