less laughed.
Was this a white woman? No wonder the white man had such an incurable hunger for Indian women!
But the creature seated next to the hard-eyed one caused Waits to gasp. The holy man and her husband were talking at once, shaking hands while Bass dipped his head and introduced their daughter … but Waits could not take her eyes off the radiance of the fair-skinned beauty who sat alongside the mousy-haired, mean-eyed, dried-up pucker of a creature.
To her surprise this second white woman pulled her hat from her head, revealing hair the color of which Waits had seen on some white men—but never in such tight curls and ringlets. She reached up and touched one of her own black braids wrapped with strands of blue and red ribbon, bewildered to discover she almost coveted hair like this white woman’s—
“Waits-by-the-Water …”
Upon hearing her name, she turned to her husband.
“You remember Dr. Whitman?” he asked.
“Yes,” she answered in English, and dropped her eyes, adding in Crow, “he is the holy man.”
Bass translated her comment to Whitman in English, then continued in Crow for her. “This woman closest to us is the holy man’s wife. Both of them are wives of holy men.”
“Not whores?”
“No,” and Titus shook his head with a wry grin that put Waits at ease with her questioning. “This is Whitman’s wife. Her name is Narcissa. Nar-Sis-Sa.”
“Nar-Sis-Sa.”
The moment the Crow woman repeated it, Narcissa Whitman smiled at her and wiped her brow with a large red bandanna, cheerfully saying, “Hello. What is your name?”
Slowly Waits repeated what her husband had taught her of the white man sounds to her name, “Waits-by- the-Water.”
Twisting halfway around on the back of his horse, Bass had managed to loop an arm about his daughter, and she was crawling over his hip to sit in front of him on the pony’s bare back.
“This here’s my daughter, Magpie,” he announced. “Tell these good folks you’re pleased to meet ’em, Magpie.”
“Pleased mee’cha.”
At the child’s tinkling reply both Marcus and Narcissa laughed, but neither the sour-faced woman nor her dull-eyed husband showed anything more than indifference bordering on contempt. Ahead of them the column was already resuming its march.
“This year we push on for the Nez Perce country,” Whitman explained to Titus as they all set off once more, continuing their descent to the river bottom. “Has Reverend Parker come in to meet us?”
With a shrug Scratch replied, “I ain’t see’d him. But I can’t say for sure, Doctor. Likely wouldn’t know him less’n someone said that’s who he was.”
“I pray he has returned,” the physician added. “He vowed he would—so to lead us back to where we are to establish our mission.”
“We will make our way through the wilderness without him if we must,” said the woman with the happy eyes.
Waits-by-the-Water found she liked the light-haired one more and more as they pressed on to the rendezvous. But the other woman’s glare made her feel self-conscious, as if that dour woman did her best to hold herself above all others by the way she peered down her nose with such haughty disdain.
When they reached the campground chosen for the supply train, the two women were helped down from their wagon while trappers scurried to provide a place to sit in the shade where the women were brought water to drink. Nearby others began to erect a large conical tent. It struck Waits as more and more white men came to gawk at the new arrivals, how those trappers fell over one another to keep the white women from having to lift a hand to help themselves.
Perhaps it was best that these two white women were hurrying on through this mountain west, she decided, best they were bound for the land of the Nez Perce far, far away. Waits-by-the-Water believed it had to be a good omen that the women did not belong to trappers, better instead that they belonged to those who were only passing through. It was plain enough that neither of the white women belonged out there—even Nar-sis-sa, despite her open friendliness. Both of them looked … soft. Not hardy enough to withstand much trial or hardship. And that was pretty much all life held in store in this brutal land.
The white men who had come to this Indian country to catch the beaver had either toughened themselves enough to survive, or they had died. Her husband explained how some of his kind had turned around and fled back to the land of the whites. Waits doubted these soft women raised inside their immobile lodges could endure a nomadic life lived outdoors through all seasons.
For now these two clearly seemed relieved to have reached this raucous white man’s gathering. Neither of them appeared to have any children, and it was pretty apparent that neither Narcissa nor the glowering one would have to raise a hand to do much of anything in caring for themselves. In fact, their hands weren’t soiled at all. Not the way dirt and soot permanently etched every knuckle and scored every wrinkle on Waits’s hands. No doubt these women didn’t know the first thing about graining a hide, chopping wood, or removing the organs of an antelope without pricking the bladder or rupturing a bowel. These white women had men who leaped right in to do everything for them. With all those trappers fluttering around like hummingbirds at a vine of sweet blossoms, it was no wonder these women didn’t know the first thing about taking care of themselves.
They didn’t have to.
The more Waits-by-the-Water watched the comings and goings in that camp, the more she decided it was a very, very good thing these women weren’t staying. Almost laughable, she thought, how these hardy, coarse men became such different creatures around their white women. Waits contented herself that the women were only passing through.
And she hoped the white men would bring no more of these soft creatures to this land.
For the first time since Bass could recollect, there were nearly as many free men come to rendezvous as there were company trappers. And a damned sight fewer of both camped this year near the mouth of Horse Creek.
Slightly more than a hundred Americans had come in with the Bridger and Drips brigades, along with no more than fifty Frenchmen between them. With the supply caravan, Tom Fitzpatrick brought in another seventy hands to wrangle more than four hundred horses and pack mules, but the lion’s share of those men would be turning right around for the States once the beaver was all bought up.
At Fort Laramie, Fitzpatrick had abandoned the long train of wagons, packing everything they couldn’t fit into nineteen two-wheeled carts onto the backs of their mules for that last leg of the journey over the Southern Pass and on to Green River. Milton Sublette, courageously recovering from the recent amputation of his leg, bounced all the way into rendezvous in one of those carts. Before he slid to the ground, Milt strapped on the cork leg purchased for him in Philadelphia by Hugh Campbell, Robert’s brother.
It brought some hot moisture to Bass’s eyes to watch that man, an unvarnished hero four years before at the Battle of Pierre’s Hole, now wobble and waver on that one good leg as old friends rushed up to hug and shake his hand as if it were a pump handle on a long-ago dried-up well. Especially the tall, slab-shouldered Joe Meek and his Shoshone wife.
Titus remembered the story fondly told of this woman and the two inseparable friends. Seasons ago Umentucken, the Mountain Lamb, had married Milton Sublette, known as the “Thunderbolt of the Rockies.” Back in thirty-two she and their young child had been with Milt’s brigade that summer morning in Pierre’s Hole when they chanced to bump into a large band of Blackfoot.
Eventually Sublette’s leg refused to heal from an arrow wound his friends claimed was poisoned. Reluctantly deciding to return east to have the infection cared for, not knowing if he would ever return to the mountains, Milt gave his wife over to his best friend, Joe Meek. For the last few years Joe had cared for this beautiful woman, raising Milt’s child as he did his own.
Shyly now, the Lamb stepped out from behind her new husband and inched up to embrace Sublette.
Not one man there mentioned the tears they saw well in Milt’s eyes, or the way he bravely snorted and swiped at his nose as the crowd pounded on his back and gawked at his new cork leg.
