time, but mostly it drifted down flat and fluffy. Hook and Sweete watched shadows of movement in the distance. Coming out of the north. Down from the heart of Red Cloud’s country.
“Chances be, Jonah,” the tall trapper replied, his eyes never straying from that distance, hopeful.
“Gotta be,” Hook said. “Down from the land of the Tongue and the Powder and the Crazy Woman. As wild a country as you were a young stallion in your early days, I’d wager.”
Sweete nodded. “Man thinks of nothing more’n getting his stinger dipped in a woman’s honey pot when he’s a young colt. Ain’t till he gets older that a man learns the real value of a woman.”
“He don’t have to get old to learn that. Not if he’s a lucky man, Shad.”
Jonah felt the keen, sharp-edged anticipation of the big man beside him. Not angry at Sweete for it, when he could have been. For there was plenty of need in Hook to experience just that same anticipation of seeing one’s woman again after a long separation. And while Hook realized his was a far greater separation in both time and distance, he begrudged Sweete not.
It had been Spotted Tail, chief of a large band of Brule Sioux camped near Fort Laramie these days, who had told the two white men that he had reason to believe Two Moons’ band of Cheyenne were coming south to the fort. Not so surprising as it might seem, the old chief had said. There were many bands coming in to Laramie to see what the peace-talkers had to say. After all, listening meant receiving presents. Fine presents the likes of which other bands had received at the talks down on Medicine Lodge Creek. Word of such splendor traveled fast along the moccasin telegraph, all the way up the Bozeman Road to Montana Territory.
Travel on the road was all but impossible this time of year, what with the Indian troubles coupled with the way winter had clamped down hard on the northern plains. Just a year ago many of these same bands had waited in ambush while a dozen young horsemen lured Captain William Judd Fetterman and eighty soldiers over the snowy Lodge Trail Ridge up by Fort Phil Kearny. And when the white men were all in the trap, killed every last one of those soldiers.
And only this past summer the warrior bands of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho had agreed to wipe out the two northernmost forts on the Montana Road in one furious day of bloodletting. As it turned out, the warriors failed in destroying Fort C. F. Smith up on the Bighorn River. It was there they failed in a day-long attempt to wipe out the few civilians and a handful of soldiers hunkered down inside a corral beside a hay field a few miles from the post.
The following August day saw a repeat of the same failure—this time Red Cloud’s own, in another hot fight that saw the Oglalla chief’s horsemen hurl themselves against a tiny ring of wagon boxes where some thirty soldiers held out against the hundreds, a matter of miles from Fort Phil Kearny while the sun hung high in that summer sky.
Nothing moved on the Montana Road now. Winter had come, and only the army escorted its occasional supply trains north. From time to time a solitary mail carrier slipped through, riding by night, making himself scarce by day. Men like Portugee Phillips, who were made of sinewy stuff that could take what the land and the sky and the warrior bands handed out—and still not break.
Riley Fordham had decided he would wait for spring and the first civilian train to gather on the outskirts of Fort Laramie, bound for the goldfields along Alder Gulch and Bannack and Virginia City.
“A man gets older and learns a little humility, doesn’t he, Mr. Sweete,” Fordham had commented one recent evening, “when he finds out he isn’t so immortal.”
“Gives a man a whole new outlook on life, Mr. Fordham, it does.”
But the prospect of waiting out the winter at Laramie did not improve the deserter’s disposition. Most of the time Fordham was looking over his shoulder, watching every new group of horsemen come riding in from the east along the Platte River Road, or south from the Colorado Territory. Always on the lookout for a familiar face, someone who might be looking for his.
The uncertainty in that waiting must surely take its toll on a man, Jonah decided. Perhaps, just perhaps, as much as the not knowing took its toll on him.
He gave Riley Fordham a grudging respect for riding away from Jubilee Usher. Better had it been that he rode away with Hattie, rather than just saving his own skin. But then again, Jonah figured, Fordham would have to deal with that ghost of failure in his own way, in his own time.
“You know that band. I can tell you do,” Jonah said, the cold breeze whipping the breathsmoke from his face. The wind here came cruelly off the Medicine Bows to the west.
Sweete smiled a bit bigger now. “Ain’t that I know the band so particular, Jonah. But I do recognize three of them ponies.”
“You see her?”
“Yes,” he said finally, pushing the wolf-fur hat back farther on his brow. “I believe I do.”
It might have been difficult for some men to pick an individual out of that crowd of several hundred warriors, women, and children, along with the old ones too lame or frail to walk or ride atop the ponies. Those wrinkled ones cackled and complained from the travois slung behind many of the horses where they sat among the folded lodge skins and camp equipment, parfleches and rawhide boxes filled with dried buffalo. Man and woman looked so much alike at this distance, every one so wrapped in blanket and robe, hoods pulled up around faces, coyote and wolf and bear hides pulled down to eyebrows to keep out the blowing, stinging snow. A colorful parade this was, coming down to Laramie in a gray December snowstorm.
In the van rode the young warriors, each brandishing his favored weapon, bow or rifle. They gave the gathering soldiers and the great number of civilians employed at the fort a brief exhibition of their horsemanship; their animals kicked up great clods of the frozen snow as they tore past, hanging from rumps by one heel, hiding behind the great, heaving necks of the grass-fed war ponies recent of the buffalo hunts in the north country. Then came the old men, each one riding more stately than the prancing bucks, no longer having to prove anything to any man, white or red. On the scarred ones came, their fans and pipes and other symbols of office now on display as they arrived at this great gathering place to be counted in those discussions to come with the white peace- talkers.
At the last came the women, guiding, riding, or walking beside the ponies who packed on their backs or dragged behind them on a wide vee of lodgepoles the wealth of the band. Like the great arms of an arrow point behind their men, the women slowed their march as the young men slowed theirs, waiting now for the Medicine Pipe Bearer to show the site he had selected for their camp.
And once the word was passed that their long march south had ended, a great shout went up from the old men, echoed by the young warriors—answered and eventually drowned out by the trilling, keening cries of joy from the women and children. Dogs barked their agreement. It had been a long, long journey of many, many days. And this would be a good camp, with many presents yet to come just for listening to the words of the white peace- talkers.
“Shell Woman!” Sweete called out, flinging his voice into the cacophony of camp making as the women shouted to one another as they raised the swirl of their lodgepoles, forming the great horned crescent facing the east.
The old mountain man turned for a moment, reaching out to snag Hook’s coat and pull him along. “C’mon, dammit.”
“Shell Woman!” Shad cried again in Cheyenne as the two white men trotted through the confusion. Man and woman, child and old one alike turned in amazement to watch the two white men zigzagging through their newly claimed camping ground heaped with the scattered lodge skins and parfleches and bundles of private riches.
A few yards ahead, he watched a woman lift her head, then turn fully around with a jerk. Surely it was Toote. She reached out to tap the person beside her, who bent over at the bundles atop the travois they had just dropped from a weary pony. The second woman stood almost a full head taller than Toote, who began running, full speed toward her husband.
“Rising Fire!” she called out in English, her arms opening as they collided in a swirl of snow.
Surely that must be the daughter, Jonah figured, watching the second, taller woman hurry forward now, pushing back her wolf-hide hat that caped her shoulders above the blanket capote. He could claim to have seen only her back of a time, and not much of that really, when she went stalking off in anger at her mother and white father months gone the way of spring and summer and autumn now.
The three embraced, the women bouncing on the toes of their buffalo-hide winter moccasins, snow swirling up their blanket-wrapped calves. Shad glanced over his shoulder, finding Hook standing there.
