“The white man just grows sick for a time before he gets better,” she whispered some of the words he had told her long ago. “But the white man does not die.”
“He gets better,” Bass vowed. “Just as you will grow better.”
“Take me away from the fire,” she begged, clearly growing weaker.
Placing his hand against her neck, Titus felt the fury of her fever in his fingertips. “I will move you away from the fire so you can rest while I make camp.”
She closed her eyes. “Bring me some water soon?”
“Yes. I will be back with some water, soon.”
Gently pulling himself away from his wife, Bass got to his feet to peer up the rugged slope of scree and loose gray talus toward the pass. Squinting in the glare of the reflected sunlight, he watched the tiny dark column snaking its way toward the open saddle far above him.
Gazing down at his wife who lay at his feet, Scratch turned and started toward the trees for firewood to melt snow into water. He moved away quickly now.
He did not want her to hear him crying.
28
Bass swatted at the mosquito, then rubbed a fingertip across the tiny red bump raised on the back of his walnut-brown hand. “I don’t figger them Blackfeets gonna bother nary Americans no more.”
Unfolding his big kerchief of black silk, old friend Elbridge Gray wiped sweat from his forehead and the ridge of his round bulb of a nose more pocked with tiny blue veins every year. “Come spring, we run across more’n one camp of them bastards. Lodges filled with dead’uns getting picked over by the jays, bones getting dragged off by the wolves. Bridger figgers what Blackfoot ain’t been kill’t off by the pox gonna be cowed but good. Won’t dare make trouble for us now.”
With a sigh Scratch nodded. “Ain’t like it was afore, Elbridge. Bug’s Boys ain’t the fearsome bunch no more.”
“For sartin the Blackfoot country’s open to Americans now,” Rufus Graham added, hissing his s’s between those four missing front teeth, two top and two bottom. Then he glanced self-consciously at the woman who sat nearby cutting moccasin soles from the thick neck hide of a buffalo robe. “After you and your wife rubbed up ag’in’ them Blackfoot what had the smallpox … how you two ever come out by the skin of your teeth?”
Titus didn’t answer for a hot, still moment, watching the woman at work over her hide. She must have felt his gaze, for she turned to glance at him for but an instant before she smiled and resumed her work.
For the longest time now she had refused to let others look at her, hiding her face beneath the hood of her capote, even as spring warmed the land and dispelled all evidence of winter. It wasn’t until early in that second summer after healing from the pox that she had relented and no longer kept her face in the shadow—about the time they started south from Absaroka for this rendezvous on the Green.
For more than a year and a half Waits-by-the-Water had lived her life all but hiding out each day. Ashamed of how the disease had ravaged her face, the woman rarely emerged from her sister-in-law’s lodge until twilight. If she did venture out to scrape hides or gather wood and water, Waits tied one of Bass’s large black silk kerchiefs just below her eyes, covering most of her disfigurement. It wasn’t until Crane died late in the spring of 1839 that Waits heeded the praise of others, finally coming to believe that somehow she really was, in a most tangible way, a heroine to her people.
She had survived—not only the brutal capture and abuse of an ancient enemy—but Waits-by-the-Water had endured the slow, cruel torture, and what should have been the sure death demanded by the pox.
“The men of your tribe, they are proud of their sacrifice scars, yes?” Bass asked her, tapping a finger against his own breast to indicate the sun-dance torture.
Waits had nodded her head in the firelight of the lodge where she and the children stayed with Strikes-in- Camp’s family while Titus was gone trapping in the hills for days at a time.
“And the Crow men,” he had continued, “they proudly mark their war wounds with vermilion paint—showing everyone just how brave they were, how great their courage to bear up in the face of death?” Titus waited for her to nod again.
“Yes.”
“To your people you are just as brave as a warrior. You faced death but did not die. Wife, you do not have to paint a red war circle around a bullet pucker, a knife scar, or a hole made by an arrow shaft. The great battle you waged against the terrible sickness is a battle none of your people ever win. In your victory that battle has marked you with its scars that show you were every bit as brave as a Crow warrior.”
Even though she began venturing out in the day without her black silk kerchief, Titus knew how frightened she had to be—afraid of what other Crow would say or ask when they saw her, afraid more of those who wouldn’t say a thing about her face but would instead look upon her with disgust or revulsion—worse yet, pity. The deep scars had marked her cheeks, pitted her forehead and nose.
Yet Waits-by-the-Water’s battle with the disease had left her scarred far deeper than the surface of her skin. She had healed from the scourge. Eventually she had begun to live again without hiding her face. But this woman would be a long time in healing the inner wounds.
“I never come down with the pox,” Bass explained to that dwindling circle of old friends gathered with him at that rendezvous near the mouth of Horse Creek on the Green River. “Only way I figger the woman come through it … maybeso God Hisself knowed how much we needed her.”
“Your chirrun?” asked Isaac Simms, brushing back some of his gleaming platinum-blond hair that continued to successfully hide the fact that he was graying.
“They was fine,” Scratch declared. “Cain’t callate how Magpie come out so good—’thout the sickness getting hold of her the way it done to her mam, what with them both being took together by the Blackfoot.”
He glanced in wonder at the woman again, noticing once more how the curvatures of her hips and backside had begun to round out her dress as she worked over the hide on her hands and knees. She had been slow to put back on most of the weight she’d lost to those weeks fighting the pox. No longer was she a raw-boned skeleton with her skin sagging over her joints like proper folks’ bedsheets draped over a split-rail bedstead. For a long time there he hadn’t believed someone so frail and thin, so downright cadaverous, could ever have the strength to fight off the scourge.
“She’s a lucky woman,” Solomon Fish observed. “Had you to care for her, pull her back from death’s door.”
Scratch nodded, taking his eyes from the woman to look at Solomon’s long beard of blond ringlets. “I’m a lucky man. She’d done the same to save my life.”
And that’s what had kept him going through those first hours, then those first long, seemingly endless, days and nights as she grew hotter, weaker, sicker. He kept reminding himself that she would never give up on him, that she would be the sort to chide him and scold him and yell at him to fight back even as he grew weaker.
So he had done just as he knew she would do for him. Always reminding her of the children, of all the four of them had to live for. Over and over doing his level best to convince her of the years left them both.
“I kept that fire going day and night,” he said quietly in the shade of those cottonwoods as the flies droned about them. “Didn’t sleep much them days—couldn’t.”
He had been scared, too afraid to rest more than a few minutes at a time even when he grew so weary he could no longer keep his eyes open, no longer able to cradle her head in his lap and wash her face with the scalding hot water that sometimes made her whimper and moan, sometimes made her wail and thrash against the grip he had on her.
“I don’t have me no idea how it helped, but chopping the wood, boiling the snow, washing her over and over every day and every night … it kept me busy—so busy I didn’t have much time to worry. I had to keep doing what I could do to keep her alive one more day. Then another come after that, and I knowed I had to keep her alive that day.”
The sun had warmed the earth that first morning after Stiff Arm’s rescue party left as Titus gathered wood close to their camp, brought the horses close, and started scooping snow into her new brass kettle to heat over the
