found a newer, deeper hurt with each new love. Instead of life growing easier, he discovered that life offered him no simple answers, no respite from the painful learning as he was knocked about.
How innocent he had been in earlier years, to believe that as he put mistakes behind him, he would find life all the easier. But for every woman who had scarred him, for every misstep he had made in life, there nonetheless had been a good friend who stood at his shoulder.
Those faces were monuments to the seasons of his life. Men who had remained steadfastly loyal through shining times and walks with death.
And now he had lost another.
Quickly Titus tugged at the bottom of his long buckskin shirt, dragging it over his head and from each arm. Yanking back the sleeves of his faded woolen underwear as the cold wind startled his bare flesh, Scratch gently dragged the knife’s blade across the back of his forearm. Then a second narrow slash close beside that first just beginning to bead and ooze with blood. Then a third, a fourth, and more he cut, slicing a series of slashes on down that forearm before he repeated the process on the other arm.
“He was the greatest of all Crow chiefs,” Bass whispered with a sigh, feeling the cold wind bite along the oozy wounds as he turned to glance at the dog. “Now he’s gone.”
Bass set the knife aside to stare at the tops of the far hills across the valley.
“So many,” he whispered now. “So many it makes a man feel he ain’t got friends left.”
Sensing the burn of tears, Titus said, “Times like this, I feel older’n I really am. And I feel any more years is a goddamned curse … living without them what’s gone is a hard thing. Too hard.”
Again, Rotten Belly’s words whispered in his head,
In the death of a great chief, Crow tradition dictated that the band mourn across four days. The entire camp would grieve any man killed by an enemy—but especially a beloved chief like Rotten Belly, felled as he was in battle with their most hated enemies.
That first day of public grieving, the chief’s lodge had been painted with wide horizontal red stripes. Inside where no fire would ever burn again, the body was cleaned, dressed in his finest war regalia, then laid on a low four-pole platform. In his hands was placed a fan of eagle feathers, and his chest was bared to the spirits. There the body rested while his people expressed their utter sorrow at his death, their unrequited anger at the Blackfoot who had killed their leader.
Across those nights and days, Rotten Belly’s warrior society conducted elaborate ceremonies in his honor. The Otter Clan saw to it that the dead man’s treasured war totems lay beside his body, and assured that his face and bare chest were painted red. For hours they beat drums throughout the camp. Wailing, mourners pierced the skin at their knees, others pierced their arms to draw blood. Some jabbed sharp rocks against their foreheads, making themselves bleed. For four days a somber pall fell over the entire camp.
Then on the morning of the fifth day, the Crow had torn down their own lodges, abandoning the site on the Grey Bull River and leaving the chief’s lodge to decay with the elements through the coming seasons. While the dead man’s relations would continue to grieve in their own way, the rest of the band went on with its life and a new leader stepped to the fore.
From time to time as the sun sank from midsky and disappeared in the west this cold day of his own private mourning, Bass left his perch to scour both sides of the bluff for deadfall poking from the crust of snow, wood he could drag back to his fire pit. After each short trip he found he needed to rest longer and longer, sucking on more and more of the icy snow as he heaved for breath. Once he was ready, Scratch clambered to his feet and trudged off again. Exhausted, he returned from what he knew would be his last trip as twilight darkened the sky and threw the land into irretrievable shadow with night’s approach.
“C’mere, boy,” he called, patting the edge of the crude lattice platform beside him.
Zeke eagerly lunged up through the snow, then went to his belly at his master’s knee, laying his jaw on Bass’s thigh where he knew he would receive a good scratching.
“I’m glad you come along, ol’ fella. You’d been a mess for her back there in camp if’n I’d left you behind. Got yourself in the way but good, staying underfoot. Better the woman didn’t have you whining and moaning after I left.”
He watched the first stars come out before he grew too tired to watch any longer. Bass banked more wood against the fire, then rearranged the robe and blanket on the platform that kept him out of the snow.
“Lay here, Zeke,” he instructed, patting the robe.
The dog came up, turned about, and nested right next to him. Then Scratch pulled the other half of the robe and that heavy wool blanket over them both. Laying his cheek down on his elbow, Bass closed his eyes, listening to the distant sounds of that cold winter night—an utter silence so huge and vast that he felt himself swallowed whole by the open sky above them.
He tried to imagine what she was doing right then, if Waits-by-the-Water had Magpie on her knee as she helped her mother prepare supper. Or if the baby was sleeping. Perhaps even talking more than ever. He wondered if his wife was thinking of him right at that moment. Surely she was, for that had to be the reason his thoughts had turned instantly to her.
And he thought on how warm it was lying next to her skin in the winter, even cold as deep as this. It saddened him to think of all those winter nights Arapooesh had endured after his wife was murdered. Knowing how hard it would be for him to endure two long winters without Waits-by-the-Water.
Perhaps Rotten Belly had sought out his own death. Some men did just that: seeking an honorable death on its own terms. Like Asa McAfferty.
Bass wondered if he would have the courage to seek out his own death when the time came.
Then he thought on his woman, and their child—knowing because of them he now shared the promise of life.
The dog lay warm against him, breathing slowly.
As the Seven Sisters rose in the northeast, low along the horizon that first night of early winter, Bass dreamed of sunlit high-country ponds and the slap of beaver tails on still water, the spring breeze rustling those new leaves budding on the quakies, and the merry trickle of Magpie’s laughter.
Dreamed with the pleasure of his wife’s lips on his.
And that joy of crossing into a span of country where he knew he was the first man ever to set foot … as if it were the day after God had created it all, made that world just for him.
There was little choice but for Scratch to put out the call—asking warriors to join him in making a raid deep into Blackfoot country.
In those first days following Bass’s return to the village, Whistler not only readily offered to go along on the journey, but volunteered to spread the call.
“I will be your pipe bearer,” declared the man not all that much older than Titus.
“That means you are the one who will take responsibility for asking others to join you?”
“Yes,” Whistler explained. “I will carry the pipe throughout the village and ask all who wish to join us in this blood journey to bring tobacco to our lodge.”
“And you’ll smoke the tobacco of those you decide will go with us?”
“
Bass felt humbled at this honor. “Whistler makes me proud, agreeing to act as pipe bearer on this war trail led by a white man.”
“You are a son-in-law who gives me honor,” the warrior protested. “The loss of my older brother and my own selfish mourning blinded me to what must be done for my brother’s memory. Now you have returned to us after many seasons. And you have mourned as my people grieve: cutting your hair and drawing your own blood. You offer to ride into the land of the enemy to take revenge in the name of the One-Who-Is-No-Longer-Here.”
