“He-Who-Has-Died was a good friend,” Bass explained. “For such a friend who treated me like his brother, I am without honor if I do not go in search of Blackfoot scalps in his name.”
After four nights in the hills beside his little fire, with only Samantha and Zeke for company as the sun rose, climbed, and fell each day, as the stars wheeled overhead each night, it was such a sweet homecoming to lie next to Waits-by-the-Water. To tell her how he had yearned for her closeness as he endured those days of isolation, eating snow and the dried meat he had packed along, moving from that rocky point on the brow of the hill only to gather more wood he lashed on the mule’s back twice each day: first with the sun’s rising so he would have enough for his little fire until dusk, and later as the sun began its tumble into the west so he had what he needed to keep his fire going through the long winter night.
Darkness spent dreaming of his wife and Magpie, slumber troubled with frightening memories and terrifying visions that awoke him in the cold and the blackness to lay more wood on the struggling flames. Clutching the old dog against him beneath the buffalo robe, Scratch sorted through the dizzying glimpses of blood and loneliness, those confusing and blurred images of violence, despair, and loss.
Each time the haunts visited him, he somehow managed to drift off again—reminding himself that he would never be frightened for himself, fearing only for those he loved.
Strikes-in-Camp was the first to volunteer. This tall, haughty warrior had reacted with violent jealousy when Arapooesh chose Scratch and Josiah to go in search of McAfferty. Whistler’s firstborn, Waits-by-the-Water’s brother, and now one of Bass’s relations, Strikes-in-Camp nonetheless remained cool and distant to the white man.
“I came to say I will go with you to take Blackfoot scalps,” the young warrior announced the afternoon of that first day Whistler spread the call across that camp of some three thousand souls. But he spoke only to his father, rarely allowing his eyes to touch the trapper.
Whistler glanced at Bass, then asked his son, “Are there any others in your society who will join us?”
“Some,” the warrior answered. “And they will come to join for themselves. I am not here to speak for them. Only for myself. You must understand that I do this not for my brother-in-law,” he explained, clearly refusing to mention the white man by his Crow name. “I go to take revenge on the enemy because they killed my uncle.”
When Strikes-in-Camp had gone, Whistler settled at the fire again and continued drinking the strong coffee he and Bass shared every afternoon, an anticipated and much-enjoyed treat the trapper brought from the rendezvous where the white men gathered.
After some reflection the aging warrior declared, “My son has been shamed, perhaps.”
“Shamed?”
“Yes, perhaps. Because you were the first to announce you were going to take Blackfoot scalps in the name of He-Who-Has-Died.”
For some time Bass did not answer. How best to walk the straight road with his words without offending Strikes-in-Camp’s father. Eventually he said, “Your son could have raised the call as soon as the four days of mourning were over, as soon as this village moved on and left the chief’s lodge behind. He could have convinced many of his warrior society to join him, and he would have been well regarded.”
Whistler could only nod in agreement. “But I think he was too busy with other things more important than family and honor.”
“We were young once, Whistler,” Bass sympathized. “The two of us, we both grew older, we both came to know there is nothing more important than family … and honor.”
Across the next five days more than ninety others came to Whistler’s lodge on the outskirts of the Crow village to ask that they too could ride along, men old and young. Some were men of such considerable winters that they had long since given up the war trail, content to let younger men do battle in the name of their people. Most of these Whistler turned away with his thanks, acknowledging that they had already given many years serving in defense of the Crow nation. And there were many of the very young, really no more than boys—most tall and lithe, of ropy, hardened muscle, but every one of them smoothfaced.
“Some mother’s son,” Whistler would say when he had turned them away and promised that he might lead them on the next war trail. “I am a father, and I know what fear I had in my own heart when Strikes was just as young, believing he was ready to take scalps for the first time. I remember how Crane wept, begging me to keep him from going. How she pleaded with me to go in secret and demand the pipe bearer turn our son away, to prevent him from going along.”
“Each man must have his first fight,” Scratch said as he savored that coffee. “My first blooding was against the Choctaw.”
“Ch-choctaw? I have not heard of these people.”
“They live east of a great muddy river, so far away that your people have no name to call that river,” Bass explained. “I was nearing my seventeenth winter.”
“That is a good age for a young man to go on his first pony raid.”
Titus nodded with a smile, saying, “I wasn’t a pony holder, even though I was with older, wiser men. None of us were out to steal horses. I was alone, hunting supper when the Choctaw found me—chased me—and wounded one of the others.”
“Did you kill any of your enemy?”
“Later,” he said, remembering how the canoes slipped up alongside the flatboat in the dark, warriors sneaking onboard to initiate their fierce and sudden attack. “I lost a good friend in that fight.”
“And you killed your first man that night?”
“Yes, I know I killed. There was no doubt.”
“Blood you spilled, to atone for the blood of your friend the enemy spilled,” Whistler observed grimly.
Scratch gazed into the older man’s eyes. “Yes. Sometimes the only thing that will do … is blood for blood.”
“Now we ride this trail together,” Whistler said quietly. “Together and alone, we go to do what old warriors know must be done.”
6
From the moment they forded the half-frozen
North by northwest the war party marched from the moment it grew light enough to ride till it became too dark to safely cross the broken landscape. If there was a place where rocky outcrops or the shelter of trees would hide the flames from distant eyes, then the older men allowed the warriors to disperse and start half a dozen fires where eight to ten men gathered to warm their dried meat, their hands, their stiffened joints from sitting too long on horseback. Fire or not, through the endless winter nights they talked in low tones as Whistler and the white man moved from fire to fire, group to group, reminding the young that they were on an honor ride, calling upon the veterans to be watchful of the young men when it came time to fight.
Every morning three or four proven warriors were chosen to mount up before the others. In the dim light of dawn-coming, these wolves would make a wide-ranging circle of their camp to learn if they had been discovered, searching for any trail of enemy spies. When they had reported back that all was safe, the scouts for that day would lead out ahead of the others as the sun brightened the winter sky. Riding ahead on both sides of the march, their task was to choose the safest path of travel through dangerous country, scouring for sign of the enemy, some telltale smoke on the horizon.
Day after day they trudged farther and farther north, encountering nothing more than last autumn’s fire pits lying cold in old camps. Ahead they watched the clouds boil around the snowy peaks of two mountain ranges, then struck the south bank of the Musselshell.
As they stopped to water their horses at a spot along the river’s edge where the water slowed, remaining unfrozen, Whistler sent the scouts across to the north. He said, “We follow the
“What your people call The Big River?” Scratch asked.
