cheerless ground. He wondered if the others were thinking on the Blackfoot and their fire. Likely the rest were all thinking on the same thing he had on his mind. Women.
He brought his hand up and gently touched the long braid tied in what hair hung in front of his right ear. Thinking about Pretty Water—how she had braided it for him the first time, then taught him to do it for himself.
For some reason tonight, he couldn’t get her out of his thoughts. That Shoshone gal who had taken on the boldest share of his nursing after buffalo hunters had discovered Bass near the spot where they had killed the sacred white medicine calf. According to that band of wandering Snake Indians, Scratch was responsible for bringing them that calf—a powerful, mystical symbol of the Creator’s blessing, a promise of plenty after so many, many weeks of want.
A damned lucky thing it had been for Titus Bass too. A hole in his chest from an Arapaho bullet, the scalp ripped from the crown of his head, grown weak as a newborn beaver kit after days of wandering half-conscious clinging to the back of his steadfast Hannah … never before had Scratch been so close to death’s door as he was that day last summer when Hatcher’s bunch and the Shoshone hunters happed onto him.
Suddenly become hero to the tribe if not their savior—Bass was treated like a chief, picked from the ground by the hunters and laid upon downy soft buffalo robes. Dragged on a travois back to the huge camp where Titus was descended upon by the women of the tribe, every last one of them clucking and chattering at once as they hoisted him into a huge buffalo-hide lodge where he would stay for the next two weeks while he was knitting up.
As he began to put back on the weight he had lost in his ordeal, the Shoshone women started out to care for him in relays, coming and going to change the noxious, slimy poultices they compressed into his bullet wounds, supporting him gently against their fragrant softness as they poured rich, greasy soup past his lips, or bathed him with scraps of cloth dipped in cool water. There had been nothing remarkable about any of those hovering faces, or the healing hands, or the gentle chatter he did not understand in the least … until one morning he awoke to the soft, lyric humming of a new woman he found sitting by the low flames warming the fire pit.
With her back turned toward him, for the longest time Bass contented himself to watch her sway gently back and forth in time to her half-whispered song as she repeatedly poked her bone awl through a piece of smoked leather, then drove the end of some sinew through the hole, down and through over and over again, tightening each stitch with a tug of her deft fingers.
He so surprised her the moment he asked for water that she stabbed herself with the awl.
But as soon as she whirled on him with a startled jerk, placing that bleeding fingertip to her lips where she licked at the blood—Bass’s mouth went dry. Finding himself pasty-tongued as he looked into those eyes that reminded him so much of Marissa Guthrie’s, that settler’s daughter back along the river south of St. Louis.
“What’s her name?” he had asked Hatcher later.
“Like that’un, eh?” Jack had said, his merry green eyes twinkling with devilment. “Some punkins, I’ll say.”
Now he was growing testy. “Her name, dammit.”
“Pretty Water,” Hatcher answered with a grin forming. “Got stabbed, did ye?”
“Stabbed?”
“Yer heart, nigger. Got stabbed in yer heart!”
As Titus lay there now in the cold and the dark, listening to the discomfort of the others on the ground, to the night sounds of their horses and the closeness of wild critters who owned this forest, Bass had to admit she had stabbed him in the heart.
Women. They had long been his weakness. How they preyed upon his heart, pierced him to his soul. Time and again hadn’t they loved holding a mirror up to his life, showing him just how weak he truly was. Not strong at all … oh, no. Women—like Amy, and Abigail, and Marissa. Then Fawn had renewed his faith in himself and the gentler sex—the sort of woman who unconditionally gave more than she got. Strange how she hadn’t expected any more from him than what he was prepared to give during their brief time together that first winter with the Ute.
A sudden lick of shame flushed through him.
What right had she to expect that he would stay on when spring freed the mountain passes and softened the ice clogging the high country streams where the flat-tails were awaiting the beaver men and their iron traps? A man simply didn’t pack along a woman, not a beaver man like Titus Bass. Come winter, was the time for bedding down with a woman, lying back in a lodge … maybeso a quick tangle or two with some likely gals come rendezvous when the sun was summer-high. A fella just had no business, no real need, to pack along a full-time night-woman. Looking after himself and his animals, his weapons and his traps, was truly more than enough to keep a man’s attention. That, and constantly watching over his shoulder, or the skyline ahead, for brownskins.
Man didn’t need no woman giving him the willies the way they sometimes did, taking his mind right off of what he should be keeping his mind to.
And Pretty Water was just that sort of woman. The kind that would steer a man’s mind off of near everything but coupling with her.
He felt his flesh stir here in the darkness at this remembrance of her. Of lying with her beneath blankets or robes as he healed from his wounds that terrible autumn. Her gentle touch mending all those places where his flesh was slowly knitting. And by the time she had come to ask him why he did not want her for his wife, he knew a smattering of Shoshone—just enough to really botch his trying to explain to her why he could not marry her.
How those big cow eyes of hers had pooled and spilled before she’d bit her trembling lower lip, turned, and dived out the lodge door.
For days Pretty Water did not return, her place taken by others who politely pretended not to hear when he asked of her. At last one of the old women told him he was healed. Time for him to rejoin the white men who had returned that very day to follow the Shoshone village through winter while Bass grew stronger. Time, the old woman told him, to forget about Pretty Water. She would never be his.
But how he longed for her again this night.
Wasn’t a man really a fool for allowing a woman to entangle herself around him so tightly? Damn—but why had God made them the sort of creatures what smelled so good, their fragrant flesh like downy velvet, all the soft and rounded curves of them rising and falling through hills and valleys?
He craved a woman, but of a time he convinced himself he didn’t want one. Oh, how maddening God had made this clumsy dance between the sexes! And in the end, how truly weak a man proved to be in the face of all the tricks and ploys a woman could pull on him.
Those last weeks among the Shoshone had been particularly hard without her. As the days passed, he had grown more and more restive, eager to take to the trail, to be gone from her, anywhere. Keeping to himself by and large so he would not have to chance upon her, until at last that morning arrived when Hatcher had moved out with his small brigade.
Someone stirred there in the black of night. Bass opened his eyes. Hatcher stood, blotting out part of the starshine above them. Nearby Fish and Wood slowly peeled themselves off their beds of cedar boughs and sagebrush. Sleeping right against the cold ground itself could stove up a man, stiffening his joints, paining his bones. Better for him to put some cushion between himself and the cold, bare ground.
What a fool he had been, Titus brooded as he sat up and volved his shoulders slowly. Remembering how ashamed he was when Goat Horn had brought his Shoshone warriors to pull the trappers’ fat out of the fire, pitching into the Blackfoot raiders who had the white men surrounded. Ashamed that he had been so demented to actually wonder if Pretty Water might have come along with the Shoshone war party. How reasonable it had seemed—since the village knew the warriors were coming to rescue Hatcher’s men, she might well choose to ride along to see for herself that Bass was still alive … for a few moments at least he could hope.
But within heartbeats all hopes were dashed. No woman had accompanied the war party. And not one of the Shoshone came up to explain to him that Pretty Water had reconsidered her actions, that she was worried about his safety. That she cared enough—
“Let’s get those cinches tightened,” Hatcher whispered, puffs of vapor streaming from his lips as he straightened and worked the kink out of a bony knee.
Without a word the others came up from the dark, cold ground, stepped over to their horses, where they threw up the stirrup straps so they could retighten the cinches. Bass shifted the Indian style chicken-snare saddle
