deepening indigo sky behind the cold, barren, snowy hills.
“Yes,” Titus said in a harsh whisper, his throat clogged suddenly. “I—I can see the hills too, Whistler.”
“Do you see him?”
Bass turned and looked off again in that direction. “See who?”
“There,” the warrior whispered. “It’s my brother.”
“You see Ara—” Suddenly he caught himself in saying the dead man’s name, realizing the grim significance of that vision. “You can see He-Who-Is-No-Longer-With-Us?”
Whistler lowered the hand he had been using to point into the distance. “And he has seen me too. He is waving to me. My brother … he is walking this way. He is coming for me.”
Whistler had died during that long, cold, cold night.
By the time Strikes-in-Camp came up the slope to where his father lay, Whistler was unable to speak, but he must have recognized the sound of his son’s voice. They touched hands, gripping one another while the warriors parted and allowed Windy Boy and Pretty On Top to bring the travois close.
On the far side of that range of hills where they had first spotted the enemy, the Crow war party chose a place for their camp where they built their fires, roasted some of the meat the Blackfoot had dropped in the valley, and put a guard around the eleven captured squaws. Five were tied together, and six were tied in a second group. Except for the quiet sobbing, the low-pitched keening of those women, it was a quiet, subdued camp.
Little was said the next morning as Turns Plenty ordered that the rest of the enemy horses be rounded up, that more of the travois be brought in with the green hides on them, along with more of the hump ribs and fleece from those buffalo the Blackfoot hunters had killed.
They would be going home with the squaws as their prisoners, with the enemy’s ponies and more than thirty fresh hides … but also dragging with them the bodies of eleven Crow dead.
The war party found their village south of the Yellowstone, hard under the Pryor Mountains. For more than an hour the war party stopped to prepare themselves to enter the camp, putting on fresh paint, stringing out the forty-six Blackfoot scalps on lances and medicine staffs. While the others were eager to push ahead, Bass chose to hang back among those who were dragging the eleven bodies behind their ponies. From one of the older warriors he borrowed some red paint, smearing it on his face.
Pretty On Top, then the ten other riders tending the wounded, stepped up and dipped their fingers into the white man’s palm, taking some of the red ocher and bear-grease mixture to daub across their foreheads, down their noses, over their copper cheekbones, and finally on their proud chins.
While Turns Plenty led the others into the village, Bass and the eleven brought up the rear of the procession with their war dead. As the column neared the outskirts of camp, women and children poured out to yell and cheer, trilling their tongues in celebration to see so many enemy horses and those robes. Then the first of the women realized she was not finding her loved one among those riders. She had not spotted a familiar face.
Then another, and another, and more.
Those eerie, bone-grating wails began as the squaws took to sobbing, the children to crying for lost fathers or uncles or brothers.
Solemnly the eleven entered the camp where more than three thousand Crow had formed along the route. Now the crowds parted as the travois rumbled slowly through their midst. On both sides of the procession women flung themselves on the ground, wrenching at their hair, wailing to the skies, crying so piteously it made the hair stand at the back of Bass’s neck where the cold wind tousled the ragged ends of the curly hair he had chopped off in mourning.
As the last man in the march, Scratch desperately searched the throng for Waits-by-the-Water, fearing more than anything that she would not see him and immediately suspect that he was among the eleven dead. Looking for her face in the crowd, any young woman wrapped in a blanket and holding an infant … eager to spot the lodge of Whistler and Crane.
Of a sudden he spotted her. Relief washed over him as he raised his arm to signal. She saw him, then stepped closer to her mother. At Crane’s other shoulder stood Strikes-in-Camp, supporting his mother as the travois bearing the dead started past. Crane clamped a hand against her mouth, as if attempting to stifle her cry, to swallow down her grief.
Strikes-in-Camp bent to say something to his mother just before Crane started toward one of the travois, her feet leaden, almost refusing to move.
Suddenly she crumbled there on the muddy snow, all the strength flushed out of her. Waits and Strikes-in- Camp knelt beside their mother as Bass leaped to the ground, sprinted the last few yards to the woman’s side.
The trapper turned to Waits as he started to scoop his arms beneath the small woman. “I can carry her to the lodge if you will lead—”
But Strikes-in-Camp shoved his arms aside. “I will carry my mother to her lodge.”
Standing and moving back a step, Scratch watched the young warrior lift his distraught mother from the snow into his arms. How tiny Crane looked, how frail and helpless, cradled there in her grown son’s arms.
For an instant Strikes-in-Camp’s eyes flashed at Bass as he started away with his mother, saying, “You are not of our blood. Go from here. You will never be our blood. You are not part of this family. So you must turn and go from here.”
8
At times through the rest of that winter and early spring, Crane’s mourning was almost more than Waits’s husband could bear.
Torn between her own grief and the love she felt for this white man she did not always understand, over time Waits-by-the-Water learned to relinquish her husband to the lonely hills for days at a time once more. All she knew was how important it was that she was there for him each time he rode back to rejoin the village.
In those four days following the war party’s return, Crane stayed with Strikes-in-Camp in his family’s lodge. The widow could not bear to enter, much less eat or sleep in, the lodge she had shared with Whistler. But it should only be a matter of time, Waits realized, before her mother would return to her home. After all, it was her lodge. Not Whistler’s.
She only hoped that her mother would be content to stay with Bright Wings and the children until spring pulled the white man back into the far recesses of the mountains. Until then Waits and Magpie would have a home, a place where the young mother welcomed her man for a night or two each time he rejoined the village. But all too quickly he grew restless, packed up, and rode off again, leaving behind a stack of hides for her to scrape. Those beaver pelts filled her days while he was gone into the hills, along with making repairs to clothing and sewing up extra pairs of moccasins, or fashioning tiny dresses and leggings for little Magpie.
By the time the war party had returned, Magpie was crawling, able to scoot about the lodge so well that Waits and Bass had to firmly scold their daughter to keep her from the fire pit. And by late winter she was already standing. Then one early spring afternoon as Bass rode back into camp to find Waits and Magpie enjoying the warm sunshine outside the lodge, their daughter stood shakily with Waits’s help, taking those first few awkward and wobbly steps toward her father as he dropped from his pony and Zeke loped round and round them.
Together all three laughed and hugged there on the damp ground as thunder rumbled across the sky as it did every afternoon at this time of year while the seasons turned. It was a good homecoming that night when rain struck the taut lodge skins like drumsticks beating on a hollow tree. All evening Magpie chattered and lumbered around the fire, falling often, but always climbing back up with a giggle, so happy was she with herself.
That night Waits again released the animal in her, hungry for his touch, impatient to have him deep and warm inside her. When he had spent himself and they both lay there exhausted by the glow of the fire, Waits-by- the-Water clung to him like a tick burrowed deep in the curly fur of the buffalo. So afraid to let go, but knowing that come a morning all too soon he would be leaving.
She could not bear to think of how hard it would be to go on if he should die. As much as she tried, Waits was less than successful in squeezing out those thoughts of life after her man’s death, the way Crane now existed without her husband. Would she too go through each day as if made cold to her marrow, feeling small, having no desire to eat, little need to sleep, hardly speaking to anyone, staring off at the hills and beginning to cry for no more
