reason than a sudden, painful remembrance?
Each time Bass left them to ride off for some distant stream, Waits-by-the-Water found it harder and harder to wait. To know exactly where her man was going on a hunt or to steal ponies or perhaps to raise some scalps— that was one thing. But not to know where her man was headed when he went in search of the beaver? That was something so altogether different.
What if her husband was killed by an enemy and his body was left where he had died? What if his pony fell and crushed him and he had to lie there in agony until he drew his last breath? Or what if he was attacked by one of the mountain predators that might scatter his bones?
She would not know where he was, how he had died, where to find his body before the wolves, a mountain lion, or a great silver-haired bear would tear his body apart. This separation was far more excruciating than when she had waited for Bass and her father to return from Blackfoot country. Each time he left to disappear in his hunt for the beaver, she had no idea of her husband’s fate until he chose to return to the village with more pelts.
Would she be a widow? Would Magpie be raised without her father?
Late that spring she decided it was far better that the two of them no longer stay behind when he left for the lonely places.
“We are going with you when you leave,” she bravely told him this cold, damp night as clouds scudded across that patch of starry sky they could see when they gazed up at the place where Crane’s lodgepoles were joined in a great inverted cone.
“It would take so much time to gather—”
“Everything we own is packed,” she explained. “Only our blankets, and these robes. We’ve done it before: with our ponies, we can carry it all.”
“Yes,” and he grinned at her. “We have done it before. I was planning to do some work trimming the ponies’ hooves—”
“Then … we can go with you?”
His face turned gray with sudden concern. “What of Magpie?”
She rolled onto an elbow, raised herself up, then gazed down at him as her breasts gently brushed the skin of his chest. “Your daughter already rides in the saddle with me.”
“How long has she been doing this?” he asked with a grin.
“Long enough.”
Bass smiled at her. “So behind my back you women have made ready to take to the long trail?”
She bobbed her head enthusiastically, afraid to tell him just how much she was wanting to leave the Crow village, needing to flee the daily reminder of her mourning mother … afraid to let him know just how much she needed to be with him, no longer able to let him go.
“Promise me, husband—promise that you will never leave me, never leave us behind with the Crow when you go to trap the beaver.”
For a long time he peered into her eyes. “That is what you want? You don’t want me to leave you behind with your people?”
She shut her eyes a moment. “I don’t belong here anymore.” Then opened them, gazing into him. “You are my people now.”
“So you want to go where I go from now on?”
“Yes,” she admitted in a small voice, looking away. Then looked back at him again suddenly, saying strongly, “Promise me—that you will never leave me a widow like my father did.”
He stroked her high cheekbones with his rough hands, then eventually said, “I promise you, woman. If it is what you want, you and Magpie will be at my side wherever I go.”
“The rest of it—the most important—tell me the rest of your promise to me,” she instructed breathlessly.
“And I promise … never to make you a widow.”
Laying her head against his chest, Waits-by-the-Water listened to his breathing, listened to his heart beating for a long time—slowly realizing that she had just made him give a vow no man could keep.
“Strangers are coming!”
At that first announcement Bass shot to his feet, dropping the crude iron files he had been using to trim the animal’s hooves, and leaped atop his pony’s back. They raced into the village toward the sound of the excitement.
A large crowd was gathering on the outskirts of camp, some of the people pointing to a dozen riders slowly making their way up the valley toward the Crow village, leading a handful of packhorses.
Waits-by-the-Water spotted him, waved her husband over. “Are they white men?”
Shaking his head, Bass studied the horsemen and said, “They don’t ride like white men. No stirrups on their saddles.”
“But they are coming from the north,” she replied. “Perhaps they are enemies who are lost and don’t realize they are about to ride into danger.”
“No, I think these riders have come to do some trading with your people.”
Within minutes more than fifty Crow warriors had mounted and were loping toward the strangers. When these camp guards were within rifle range, the distant horsemen raised their weapons in the air and fired, puffs of smoke jetting from each muzzle a heartbeat before the booms echoed from the far hills.
“They come in friendship,” Bass declared, laying his arm around her shoulder in relief.
No better sign of friendship in this wilderness than for a man to empty his weapon upon approaching a camp.
The small band of strangers halted as the Crow guards swirled around them. They exchanged handshakes and slaps on the back before the entire group continued for the village. In short order it was plain to see these riders were not only Indian, but Crow.
But Bass studied the packhorses more than he did the riders. “Appears they’ve got some trading on their minds.”
Upon entering the village the visitors dismounted as the Crow guards turned aside with their ponies. Stopping near the center of the camp circle, the spokesman for the newcomers gestured for quiet before he started to speak.
“Friends! Fellow
That voice.
Bass stepped closer so he could peer at the speaker, pricked by something recognizable about the man. Whispering to his wife, he asked, “You know him? Ever see him before?”
Waits wagged her head and shifted a squirmy Magpie in her arms.
“Where is Yellow Belly, your chief?” the visitor asked.
“I am here,” the band’s leader exclaimed as he shouldered his way through the crowd. “Who is asking for me?”
“Medicine Calf,” the spokesman declared.
Scratch remembered hearing that warrior’s name….
Yellow Belly stepped closer to the visitor. “You are the one who was taken as a child and returned to Absaroka as a beaver trapper?”
“So you have heard my story?” Medicine Calf bellowed beneath the huge cap he wore, made from the entire skin of a mountain lion that spilled clear down his back. “Then you know I am one of you, know that your people are my people too!”
“We have heard the stories of your life with the River band,” Yellow Belly replied. “And how famous you are with the women! Why have you come? Did you bed the wrong woman and now you are forced to leave that village?”
“No!” and Medicine Calf laughed uproariously. Something about that laugh pricked another familiar chord in Bass. “I have come with presents for the chiefs, goods to trade.”
“To trade?” Real Bird asked as he stepped up beside Yellow Belly.
