used to the dwelling last winter when it came time for the village to move a few miles upstream away from the Yellowstone. The camp had begun to stink something awful from all the gut-piles, rotting meat, and human offal piling up back in the trees. Maybe as much as a half-dozen times Arapooesh’s band would move each winter, finding themselves another place that offered open water, plenty of firewood and grass for their pony herds, along with some protection against the possibility of attack.
As winter deepened, it seemed the Crow grew more relaxed—less concerned about their most fearsome enemy. Too damned cold now, the snow drifted too deep for the Blackfoot to try anything as foolish as a major assault on a village in the heart of Absaroka—home of the Crow.
It hadn’t been long before Scratch had felt a part of them too. Much more a part of them than he had years back when he had come to the Bighorn country with Silas, Billy, and Bud. Perhaps he had felt set apart from the tribe because the three of them had not tried in the least to fit in with their winter hosts. Just as they had refused to do with the Ute. Instead, the trio of white men had stayed apart, taking all that they needed from the Crow and doing little to repay in kind all that had been given them with such generous hospitality. Whether it was food, or a woman offered to warm their robes, or some shelter from the raging winter blizzards—Silas and the others had considered themselves above their hosts, remaining as aloof as those company brigades traveling through one tribe’s territory or another.
But for a lone man eager to learn all the more about these attractive pale-brown people, the past winter in Absaroka with Bird in Ground and Pretty On Top was all that he had hoped it would be. And from that first night’s feasting and celebration, it seemed that old Arapooesh took to the white man, right off.
“Rotten … Belly?” he had repeated the words spoken to him by Bird in Ground.
The man-woman rubbed his stomach with a flat hand, bending over slightly and groaning as if he were sick. “Rotten Belly, yes.”
“That’s Arapooesh’s name?”
Indeed, it was how the venerable chief was known among the two divisions who roamed Absaroka. Recently he had brought his wife and family back to live with her band of the Apsaalooke after spending many years among his River Band. And with the regrettable death of Big Hair, his wife’s people turned to the respected warrior and tribal counselor to lead them into the coming winters.
After recouping his strength in the Crow village for several days, Bass had journeyed east to retrieve the trade goods and supplies he had abandoned when he’d set out on the trail of the horse thieves—just one day shy of reaching his cache. After taking two days to bury the last of his pelts in that black hole, he loaded up the rest of what he needed for the winter on Hannah’s back and turned about for Rotten Belly’s camp. He made it back just as a howling blizzard raked the land. That first night back he slept in Bird in Ground’s lodge, inviting the chief and some of the old warriors, along with Pretty On Top and other youngsters, to a giveaway dinner.
Oh, the way those Crow eyes sparkled as he passed around small gifts of coffee and sugar, some powder and brass tacks, fingerings and bracelets, hanks of ribbon and beads! The men clucked and laughed—for it had been a long, long time since any of them had seen such riches as these!
“Do you see, Pretty On Top?” Bird in Ground playfully chided the young man. “See what a man receives in return when he gives away his friendship to a stranger?”
Later on as that winter grew old, as the wind keened and twisted through the Yellowstone Valley, the chief gathered his friends and advisers in his lodge for a red-stick feast. From the pot for this traditional Crow celebration, the invited guests all plucked tender pieces of elk. Afterward they scraped the greasy marrow from bones they pulled from the coals and cracked upon the rocks ringing the fire pit. Then they smoked and related their coups.
When it came time for Bass to count his own exploits sitting there at Rotten Belly’s left hand, he enthralled them into the deep hours with his tales, stripping off his shirt and showing them those scars earned at the hands of the Blackfoot, being hunted down by the Apache far to the southwest of Absaroka, fighting the Mexican soldiers and fierce Comanche raiders in that land of warm waters, as well as his two struggles with the grizzly—letting them see the scars of his few seasons among the mountains, how the wilderness had marked his whipcord-lean white body.
After the sixteen men nodded and murmured in approbation that he still lived, Arapooesh had refilled his pipe and sent it around the circle another time. And when it reached the chief at the end of its circuit, Rotten Belly solemnly proposed to give a name to the man who had come to his people earlier that winter—on foot and wearing the fur of a coyote wrapped around his head so that only the white man’s eyes and cheeks showed above his beard and mustache, those frosted whiskers similar in color to the gray pelt of that coyote Scratch had worn for winters beyond count already.
“So I give my white friend a name I will call him from this night onward,” Arapooesh declared.
The rest of those gathered in the lodge had cheered with approval, slapping their thighs, banging their tin cups on the rocks ringing the fire.
Then Arapooesh had continued. “So, my friends—it is with a full and happy heart that I take this white man as my brother. From this night he will be known among our people as
It never failed to bring a smile to his heart, warming him, every time he thought about his dear friend, Rotten Belly. Remembering how the chief and Bird in Ground and even young Pretty On Top had come to mean so much to him through those winter moons. The sort of men who formed a bulwark against the storms in a man’s life.
Like Jack Hatcher, Caleb Wood, and the others.
Men red and white, men for all the seasons of his life.
As the ice on the Yellowstone had begun to crack and shatter, opening the river early that spring, he had taken his leave as Rotten Belly’s band started upriver to the south, while he pointed his nose down the valley to the east. Just past the big rock, he had crossed to the north bank of the Yellowstone and located the patch of ground where he had dug his cache last autumn, the frozen earth lying beneath a snowdrift he had to shovel aside.
As he pried back the thick sod lid to the cache’s neck, Scratch had suddenly remembered what he hadn’t during that winter in Absaroka—he had turned thirty-seven!
Although there had been times during his winter with the Crow that he had wondered on Christmas and remembered Taos during the Nativity festival, thinking too how his own birthday came only a week after that celebration … Bass hadn’t given all that much thought to adding another ring to his years.
It had simply been too wonderful a winter in the land of the Crow: new friends, plenty of protection from the wind and the cold among a people who from time to time provided their guest with one woman or another to relieve the trapper’s pent-up hungers.
“Who’s been sending me these women who come to my lodge?” he had asked Bird in Ground one cold day as they were out gathering deadfall for their fires.
The strange man of the Apsaalooke stood and looked squarely at Bass. “Since you do not want me for your wife, I decided that you must satisfy your appetites with the women of our tribe.”
“Believe me when I say, if I ever wanted to settle down with a man-woman among your people for the rest of my winters, I would choose you, Bird in Ground.”
“I am afraid I will never have a husband,” the Crow sighed. “Look around. There aren’t any others now who are like me—touched by this same spirit medicine. Perhaps I can find some way to show the power of my medicine, to prove to other young men of our tribe that I would make them a good wife.”
“It is not hard for any man to see that you would make a good wife.”
The man-woman smiled in that gentle way of his. “I realize you will never be my husband. But you will always stay one of those strong in my heart.”
“And you will always stay one of those strong in my heart too.”
Had to be Bannock under that distant dust cloud. Damn. They sure weren’t good folks like the Crow.
Bannock.
Certain that’s what they were, Bass tarried a while longer after finishing his cold meat before retightening cinches and pushing on into the afternoon. He’d do all he could to give the Bannock war party a wide berth.
