slowly sank from its lofty heights. And he ruminated that he could never take Waits-by-the-Water onto that rolling land of the buffalo prairie or beyond to those hardwood forests where corncrackers scratched at the ground and raised their fixed communities.
They were no place to raise children—not back there where the trees grew so tall and thick a man couldn’t see any distance at all, back east where a man looked up only to see a portion of the sky. No place for a child to grow tall and strong as they would here in these mountains, breathing this clean, dry air. Back east, he remembered, the men on that old frontier of hardwood forests had a far different look in their eye than these hivernants of the high Stonies. Back there, closed in with the thick timber and small patches of sky that too often turned gray and drenched them with rain—such men did not possess the far-seeing squint of those iron-forged few who made a home beyond the western prairies.
Out here a man quickly took on a decidedly distant gaze. He grew accustomed to gazing across great stretches, searching far ridges, studying the skyline for dust or smoke, game or foe, reading those green threads that beckoned him to water as if they were parchment maps, ciphering each swaybacked, snow-covered saddle that allowed him a pass between the mountain peaks—scratching every mile of the journey into the fastness of his memory. This unimaginably huge land required a man to stretch his eyes far beyond what had been required of him in those closed-in, narrow-bounded forests back east.
Come from what he had been, a man either became much more than what he was back east—or he left his bones to bleach on the banks of some uncharted mountain stream. So again this summer those who realized they had teased and taunted Dame Fate long enough chose to rake in what chips they had left and scurry east. Leaving behind a life. Leaving behind loved ones.
“I vowed that if the woman died,” Titus quietly explained to the circle of friends that hot summer afternoon, “I wasn’t returning to the Crow.”
“What of your young’uns?” Elbridge asked.
He grew thoughtful. “Told myself they’d grow up just fine, took in and raised by them what would come to love li’l Flea and my darling Magpie like their own.”
“Couldn’t bear to face ’em,” Isaac said.
“No, wasn’t that a’tall,” Bass replied with a shake of his head. “If’n I’d buried the woman in a tree, proper that way for the wind to take her … I knowed I would ride on down that north side of them mountains, making straight for Blackfoot country.”
Rufus nodded. “Take you some goddamned hair.”
“One by one,” Scratch continued. “I’d kill ever’ last one of them bastards I chanced across. Times were at nights while I kept myself awake caring for the woman, I figured how I’d mark the bodies: cutting on ’em, scraping my letters in each one so they’d come to know who I was and what I was about.”
Solomon glanced at the youngsters nearby and asked, “You never figgered to see your young’uns again?”
“No,” he confessed. “I was gonna ride and kill till ever’ one of the Blackfoot was dead … or them sonsabitches kill’t me.”
Gray sighed. “Lookit your young’uns now, Scratch. Ain’t it turned out for the best you didn’t leave ’em for the Crow to raise? And you ain’t dead and skulped up there in Blackfoot country!”
“And the woman pulled through,” Graham cheered.
“Were a bunch more days afore she was strong enough to sit a horse, howsoever,” Bass continued his tale. “I got us back over the pass just a’fore another storm blowed down on us. We made it to some good timber and sat it out whilst she got a bit more of her strength back. Don’t know how many days that was, for I’d stopped a’counting and carving on that ax handle.”
Day by day they had backtracked for the Crow village, become anxious when they didn’t find it where the lodges had been standing weeks before when the ordeal had begun. As they were pushing out of the abandoned campsite along the snowy ground churned with travois scars, Titus had spotted the scaffold propped across the branches of a distant cottonwood that stood at the base of the rimrock. And from the way the gnarled tree trunk below that robe bundle was marked, they knew it had to be the body of Strikes-in-Camp.
“Them Crow gave him a decent funeral,” he declared, “even if they never did bring his body into camp— feared as they was of the pox.”
Beneath the spreading branches of the cottonwood they camped that afternoon, and as Bass built a fire and gathered wood for the night, Waits-by-the-Water knelt and began her mourning. She chopped off more of her hair and tossed it into the wind, those shorn locks grotesquely framing that wounded, pitted face. Tears flowed as she wailed, tearing her coat from her arms so she could slash her flesh until her strength was gone and Bass raised her from the frozen ground, carrying his wife back to the warmth of the fire where he fed her, wrapped her, then rocked her to sleep.
“After the second day I told the woman it was time for her mourning to be done,” Titus said, looking over to see his young son toddling his way now. “It was time to be finding our young’uns.”
Some two and a half years old by then, young Flea lumbered the last few yards as his father spread his arms to welcome him. The boy vaulted into the air, sailing into Bass’s arms where he settled into his father’s lap, looking round at the hairy faces gathered there in the afternoon shade as the deerflies droned and Horse Creek gurgled along its sandy bed.
“How long it take you to find them Crow?” Solomon inquired.
“Weren’t long, not really,” he said, rubbing Flea’s bushy head affectionately. “They took off right after the four days of mourning for Strikes-in-Camp and them others the Blackfoot killed in the ambush. But we found ’em eventual’.”
It had made for quite a scene when Bass and Waits-by-the-Water showed up near the camp one day late that winter of 1838. As soon as he had seen the camp guards loping their way, Scratch halted, waiting. Among the sentries had been Pretty On Top.
The young warrior’s eyes filled with a mist as he whooped, his cry sailing to the cold blue sky of Absaroka as he brought his pony skidding to a stop with the seven others right in front of the white man and his wife who clutched the flaps of her hood over her face, not daring to let these people who had known her from childhood see her wounds.
“My heart sings!” Pretty On Top cheered, slapping his breast. “You are returned with your wife! How is this that she did not die?”
“My husband would not let me,” Waits announced from the muffle of her hood, surprising even Titus. “He said I could not die.”
“Then the medicine of Ti-tuzz is mighty!” cried Three Iron. “In the stories of our great-grandfathers, when the pox visited itself upon us, very few were spared death before the scattering of the bands. So the First Maker has truly smiled on you, Waits-by-the-Water.”
She had looked over at her husband and said, “Yes, I know how the First Maker has smiled on me.”
The eight guards yipped and whistled with approval, causing their horses to jostle with the sudden loud exuberance.
Bass found her eyes smiling at him from the shadows of her hood and said, “Yes, woman—the First Maker has smiled on us both.”
Little Flea had been at their horses’ legs before the two of them even dismounted beside Bright Wings’s lodge. And Magpie was already reaching her arms to her father as Bass brought his pony to a halt. He had leaned over, caught her by the wrist, and swung her up behind him, marveling at how much it seemed she had grown. As he kissed and hugged her right there on horseback, Waits dropped to the ground to gather little Flea into her arms, smothering him with her kisses. Not knowing what he was doing, the babbling child pushed back the hood—his own eyes suddenly wide with surprise, even fear.
Around the woman others gasped, fell back a step, as Waits-by-the-Water snatched the hood over her head, beginning to sob because the boy continued to stare at her in shock and fright. But in that next moment Crane emerged from the lodge doorway, her stooped body hurrying to her daughter’s side where she flung her arms around Waits—crying, wailing, sobbing, keening, blubbering all at once.
Then Bright Wings was there too, the three of them hugging, their arms wrapped around Flea as he rested on his mother’s hip. The moment Magpie and Bass hit the ground, the young girl sprinted to her mother’s side, ducked between some legs, and ended up in the middle of all those women happily reunited.
