could readily see why Tuttle had repeatedly emphasized that the Ute were a good people to hunker down with for the winter.
“Why,” Silas replied, “the woman who said she’d take y’ in, Scratch.”
“T-take me in?” he echoed, then immediately grew particular. “She be young or old?”
“Y’ grown particular?” and Cooper flashed him a disapproving look. “It don’t matter, do it?”
With a shrug Bass glanced over the female faces and said, “Long as it’s a place to sleep, I s’pose it don’t.”
Cooper slapped a hand on Bass’s shoulder. “Leastways, she’s old enough to be a widder woman.”
“A widder woman!” Billy shrieked. “Ah-hah! Scratch’s gonna fork him a widder woman for winter!”
“Just like the widder woman what give him the nits!” Tuttle had gushed with laughter too.
Enough laughter that it made Bass’s cheeks burn in embarrassment, and his stomach churn with a sudden angry seizure. Maybe he had no business expecting anything better, what with his being the greenest among them, but to be made the butt of their jokes once again—after all this time and after so many jokes played on him … now, that galled him ail the more.
“A widow woman,” Titus repeated, the words tasting sour. He swallowed hard, forcing down the bitter tang of them as he was of a sudden reminded of the Widow Grigsby. Then he jutted out his chin. “By damn, you niggers—at least that squaw’ll be no stranger to gathering firewood!” He whirled on black-haired Billy to say right to the man’s face, “And I’ll wager she knows her wav around a kettle pot too, Billy Hooks! Better’n I can say for you!”
Cooper banged Tuttle on the back, roaring with good-natured laughter, throwing his head back and letting his voice rise to the winter sky. “Why, if the greenhorn here ain’t got him a bit of ha’r after all!”
Bass continued, “So if’n it’s here we’re to plop down for the winter, by Jehoshaphat, I figure to stay warm and keep my belly full at that widder woman’s fire!”
Tuttle slapped a hand on Hooks’s shoulder, the both of them sniggering uncontrollably. Bud said, “I’ll … I’ll bet that widder woman knows her way round under a buffler robe too, Titus Bass!”
Silas Cooper roared again at that, his Adam’s apple bouncing up and down between the thick, muscular cords in his neck, then told his three companions, “Good for us it be that all this high-larity come at just the time when these here Ute bucks is all smiling and acting good-natured themselves.”
“Wouldn’t be for us to be laughing at that ol’ chief’s gift of his niece, would it, now?” Tuttle observed, winking at Bass.
“Boys, looks to be we got us as prime a place to hunker down for the next few weeks as there be in the mountains,” Silas repeated later as the crowd began to disperse and the four chosen women remained behind in the bright afternoon light to take home their white lodge guests. “Empty your packs and keep your plunder at your side this first night. Be sartin y’ picket your animals outside your door come sundown—so it be close at hand for the first few nights. Jest in case.”
Tuttle asked, “You skeery of these here Yutas, Silas?”
“They seem to be a good sort and welcomed us all and one,” Cooper replied. “But it don’t ever pay to let down your guard witn red niggers—now, do it?”
“When we get together again, Silas?” Tuttle inquired, some consternation crossing his face as the four women began to inch away to their own lodges, each one signaling for her guest to follow.
Cooper smiled within his dark beard, his eyes dancing like a bull elk about to rut. “I don’t see me any reason to gather back up till morning, boys—when we’re damn good and ready to roll out of the she-wimmens’ warm blankets,” he said, looping his long arm over the shoulder of the sharp-nosed woman who was taking Cooper in.
Titus gave the three other women a quick study and decided his must surely be the oldest among them. Yet she had the kindest face. In his book such an attribute went a long, long way to making him feel content enough to leave the company of the others and follow her home.
That first day he had looked back once, watching the others splitting up, leading their horses and pack animals away in four different directions. Then she had pulled on his elbow, motioning wordlessly, and pointed to a small smoke-blackened lodge off at the edge of the village circle near a copse of bare-limbed aspens.
For sure, he had decided right then and there: it was one thing to saddle up and push west all on one’s own—totally alone. Such solitude was something Titus had no problem enduring; indeed, he had welcomed that longed-for aloneness. But that evening for those first few hours there in the Ute camp, he found himself feeling something altogether different. Sensing most a bit of despair and frustration at being brought here and handed off to stay among a foreign people, not knowing their language nor their customs … all that mingled with his own excitable male anxiety at again being set adrift with a woman—almost exactly the same feeling he had experienced when the riverboat pilot Ebenezer Zane had arranged it so that for an entire night a very young Titus Bass was to be alone and undisturbed with an Ohio River whore named Mincemeat.
Many things that first awkward night with the Ute widow made him fondly recall his nervousness and selfdoubt with the skinny, chicken-winged whore. But, like Mincemeat, this squaw with the young child slung in a blanket at her back certainly did her best to make the white stranger feel welcome, at home, and very much wanted.
It came as no surprise when she openly nursed the child in front of him after she had rekindled the fire, brought in some water from the frozen creek nearby, then put on a kettle to continue boiling that elk heart. Once the child had fallen asleep at her breast, the woman had nested the young boy back among the buffalo robes at the side of the lodge, pulled back on her own hide coat, and ducked out the lodge door. In minutes she was back—but only to fetch up her crude, rusted camp ax. Again she left the lodge, but as soon as he heard her chopping at wood with the ax, Titus pulled on his blanket coat and went out to help her.
Inside once again with the woodpile replenished to the left of the door, they shed their coats and the woman took some dried greens from a round rawhide container, dropping them into the boiling water where the elk heart rolled and tumbled in its gelatinous juices, slowly cooking. She poured him a tin cup of water from a small skin she had hung from a rope that went from pole to pole, wrapped about each one, inside that small lodge. As he sipped slowly, Titus silently inspected how there was a separate section of hides suspended from that rope so that they formed an inner liner tied some five feet high from ground to rope. A portion of that liner was even lashed across the doorway so that it now formed a double inner barrier against winter’s cold, holding within even more of the small fire’s warmth.
That proved to be no problem: keeping enough of the fire’s radiant heat. He soon discovered a small fire was quite enough to warm such an insulated lodge. Many were the early mornings when he routinely awoke in the gray, predawn cold, or those evenings as he drifted off to sleep with her already snoring softly beside him, or on each of those dark nights when he slowly came awake for no good reason he could fathom, listening to the nightsounds in the camp around him, staring up at the black scrap of sky between the two large flaps of buffalo hide that surrounded the smoke hole, helping direct and pull the fire’s smoke from the lodge. It was up there where the poles came together in their unique spiral—the collection of poles rising slowly, gently, even beautifully, rising in a swirl as smoke itself would spiral slowly on its way to the heavens.
So warm had it been some of the past winter days that the woman would pull back the liner flap and push aside the door, leaving the entrance open, allowing a breeze to slip into the lodge and rise up through the smoke hole, creating a cool current of air that pleased him. If the day was a sunny one, and the others were not dragging him off to check on their traplines, the four white men would join the warriors old and young sitting in the sun. There the trappers each had a chance to practice more of their spoken Ute and the Indians practiced their English. Still, because most of their conversations could not be expressed aloud, there were many hours that winter for Titus to practice his sign language. For the longest time he continued to speak aloud the words his moving hands formed—and soon discovered that some of the warriors, like the widow, did their best to mimic his English for certain objects, actions, or feelings.
Like the routine he had learned on his father’s farm, or that daily ritual he grew accustomed to on Ebenezer Zane’s Kentucky flatboat as it floated downriver to New Orleans in the autumn of 1810, this easy rhythm of a trapper’s winter life as a man went about the predawn setting of the traps and the twilight harvest of his beaver— this too was a satisfying existence of routine and regularity.
Somewhere in the darkness out beyond the nearby fringe of lodgepole pine, Bass heard a dog bark now. Easy enough to tell it was a camp dog, not one of those wild dogs Billy explained were called coyotes. No, this one
