Buffalo Palace

Embarrassed, he stammered, “W-wait—I don’t know what y-you’re ’bout to—”

Tugging one last time, she managed to wrench the blanket out of his hands and rip it away from him. Now he stood before her totally naked, dropping his hands down to cover his manhood. Suspicious that this strange, frightening creature of a woman wanted him to poke her right there in front of the child.

But instead Fawn slipped her hands in behind his forearms and flung the leather belt around his waist, slipped the end through the buckle and latched it loosely over his bony hips. Then she retrieved the long strip of foot-wide canvas at her feet and stuffed one end up through the front of his belt, taking hold of the other end to jab it between his knees. Stunned into stone silence, Bass remained motionless as the widow went deftly about her work.

Looking over his shoulders, he watched as Fawn pulled the canvas up between his thighs, stuffed it up through the belt at the small of his back, then tugged it down until the end almost reached the back of his knees. Quickly she stepped in front of him and tugged on that end of the cloth until it too hung just at his knees. Only then did she step back and swiftly admire her work.

Fawn was soon back in motion. She took the buckskin shirt from where it hung over his arm and spread it over her hands so that she exposed the wide neck hole trimmed with red wool. Quietly she said, “You.”

He nodded and quietly murmured, “Yeah, me.”

Bass dipped his head forward for her to slip the shirt over his hair, then brought his two arms up to poke them into the long fringed sleeves. Pulling down on the long bottom of the garment, the widow smoothed the shirt out, stood back a moment, then went to his right arm. There she rolled up the long sleeve into a cuff to shorten it.

As she began to work the same alteration on the left arm, Titus said, “I s’pose your husband is a … was a bigger man than me.”

That was plain to see from the way Bass swam in the sheer size of the shirt: the width of it draped across his bony shoulders, the length of the sleeves she had to cuff to shorten for him, and the immense girth of the shirt festooned with ermine skins and finished off with wide strips of colorful decoration.

As she bent to retrieve one of the leggings from the floor of the lodge, Titus tapped a finger against one of the strips of decoration.

“What’s this?” he asked.

Instead of answering, the widow knelt before him, tugging at his foot until he grabbed hold of a lodgepole to steady himself and raised the cold foot. She shoved the legging up his leg, pulled his foot down, then pushed up the bottom of the shirt so that she could tie the two straps at the top of the legging in a loop over his belt. With the second legging knotted, the widow brought forth a few pair of moccasins. Again she knelt and pulled up one of is bare feet.

But as quickly she sat back on her haunches and shook her head. It was plain to see that the white man’s feet were much too small for the moccasins. She flung them back onto the rawhide container, then appraised her work thoughtfully. With his old pair of moccasins and that canvas breechclout, the dead warrior’s clothing would do him for now.

Then she turned from Titus, sat, and pulled the boy from his blankets as she tugged at the open side of her hide dress to expose a full breast.

Bass swallowed uncomfortably and sat, trying not to look at the breast. His heart hammered again in his chest as it had last night as he’d tossed and turned—thinking of the woman lying just a matter of feet away in the lodge, yet not knowing the ways of these people, how to approach an Indian woman with any suggestion of their coupling. So here she was, again exposing that soft round breast to him as she began softly humming to the child cradled across her lap in the rumpled blankets as she rocked him while he had his warm breakfast.

“Titus,” he said finally, quietly—standing there above them.

She did not look up immediately when he spoke to her from the other side of the small lodge that he feared she hadn’t heard.

“Titus.”

When he repeated it, she raised her head and smiled.

Bass tapped his chest. “Titus.”

“Ti-tuzz.”

He nodded. “Me.”

“Ti-tuzz you.”

“Yepper. Titus. Me.”

It grew quiet in the lodge once more as his cold, frozen feet warmed by the fire. Then he asked, “You?” and pointed at her.

“You. Ti-tuzz.”

“No,” he replied, and shook his head, then scooted a little closer to them, just near enough to lean forward and touch the top of her arm where the boy’s head was cradled. “You.”

Her eyes grew all the wider, round and black as berries thick on the hopvines back in Boone County, hard by the Ohio. With them she softly peered at the white man, looking into him; then the tip of her pink tongue licked at her lips before she spoke.

“Tui-rua-ci.”

“Titus, me. You, Tui-rua-ci.”

She nodded, smiling at him with more genuine happiness than he had seen on her face since coming to her lodge the day before yesterday. It was a smile that made him forgive her for burning his clothes, made him forgive the three trappers for bringing him here to such a foreign and frightening place, made him forgive himself for wanting another man’s widow so badly.

“Tui-rua-ci,” Fawn repeated, then her eyes dropped behind those lashes as she said his name softer than he could ever remember hearing it spoken: “Ti-tuzz.”

8

Every few days during the heart of that winter when the weather tempered, the four of them left the village with some of the Ute warriors for a few days of hunting. Not only did they seek game to take back to the hungry mouths awaiting them in the winter camp, but the brownskins also surveyed the countryside for pony tracks, for firesmoke, for any sign of their enemies.

“’Rapaho?” Titus repeated Turtle’s admonition as the white men came to a halt at the tree line bordering a clearing where the advance warriors had just come across some hoofprints.

“That’s what these niggers say they was,” Billy Hooks responded instead. “’Rapaho. Good-sized war party of ’em too.”

As the last of the group halted, most of the warriors dropped to the ground to inspect the tracks.

Silas Cooper agreed. “More red-bellies—out looking for ponies, h’ar, and coup!”

“How they so sure what band it were?” Titus asked, intrigued.

With a shrug Cooper explained, “Maybeso they figger to tell us they know the difference atween ’Rapaho and Shian—but I’ll be damned if I can. C’mon over here with me, fellers—an’ let’s have us a look-see.”

The three dismounted to join Cooper, dispersing among the Ute, who were carefully moving up and down within the many foot-and hoofprints, each blanket-coated warrior bent over, closely studying the enemy’s spoor. The winter breeze tousled the feathers tied to loose, flowing hair or to those animal skins the warriors had pulled over their heads in the fashion of caps, each one tied with a rawhide string beneath a bare brown chin.

“That one,” Cooper announced, pointing to one of the warriors, “he says that spot be where one of ’em got off his pony to look at a bad hoof.” Silas bent over and studied the snowy, crusted ground himself. “Yep—I can see it plain my own self too. There be that nigger’s pony prints … and there be where the nigger clumb down afoot.”

Tuttle commented, “Then you’re telling us these Yutas know what sort of red nigger made them tracks just from the mokerson prints?”

“That be the how of it,” Cooper replied.