daughter motioned them to remain.
“Do not think my father is done. So tired is he with his years, he only needs a little rest now.”
For a long time the soft, wrinkled eyelids remained closed in that gray-skinned, skeletal face. Then, just when Scratch was growing restless, the medicine man finally spoke again, in even more of a whisper this time, his voice grown all the weaker. Eventually the daughter turned her attention from him to the white men and made sign.
“If the mountain lion or the great silver bear ever came to our villages the way the white men have … the lion or bear goes down under our arrows and lances.
“But the eye spirits in my dreams tell me we do not have enough arrows and lances for the many white creatures who have come boldly into our country, you who do not stay on the edges of our camps. My dreams tell me we can never kill all of those wild white creatures who have come to change things forever.
“We do not understand,” she translated into sign. “Once we were masters in our land. Now we are hungry, and afraid. Above us in our skies, the sun has set on our faces. Night has forever fallen across our land … never again will we ride the moon down.”
As if she knew he must be thirsty from all the talk, weary from all the effort, the old woman gave her father some water from a horn ladle, then settled at his elbow where she made sign.
“He is done. All done, what he wants to say to you. Farewell.”
The next morning the ancient seer was dead. Chances were good that his last words were spoken to some white men he believed were chiefs among their people. While Meek, Newell, and Sweete had joked with Bridger on their way back to camp about Gabe’s being a chief among the trappers, Bass wondered instead why the old man hadn’t sent for the rich or the noble, the holy or the powerful, among the white booshways and traders, sportsmen, and missionaries camped along the Green River.
Perhaps the old man had no desire to talk to the loftier sort who had never truly penetrated to the heart of the mountains. Maybe he wanted more so to speak to those who had trapped and crossed his land, those who had invaded and thereby changed life as his people had known it.
Funny—until this moment Scratch hadn’t remembered the old rattle shaker. But now, here among the glittering but dying yellow leaves, watching the rhythms of death slowly overcome the seasons of life, he suddenly imagined that the old man and his people were very much like the beaver. Unlike those tiny worms said to spin their threads of silk for hats, the beaver had to be sacrificed for others to reap their harvest. A man took the hide and discarded the rest.
The rattle shaker must have figured the trappers had come to his country to take what they wanted in the way of furs and women, discarding everything else when they moved on. Perhaps his people were like the beaver.
So the old man’s dream began to disturb him in that season of dying before the onset of winter—a terrifying vision of perpetual night that held no hope of a moonset, no prayer that any of them could ride the moon down and bring about the coming of day.
This autumn, more than any before, Scratch sensed the cold stab him to the marrow.
“What the hell’s a man call this godforsaken place of yours, trader?” Bass roared as he ushered his wife through the narrow doorway cut into the clay-chinked cottonwood logs and threw his shoulder back against the crude door planks to batten it against the wind.
Samuel Tullock looked up from the floor where he was sorting through some buffalo robes a handful of Crow warriors had brought in. All six of them stood to peer at the new arrivals.
“That you, Bass?”
Tearing the bulky coyote hat from his head, Scratch slapped the fur against the tail of his elk-hide coat, knocking loose a cloud of snowflakes. Despite the best efforts of the stone fireplace at the corner of the small trading room erected there on the north bank of the Yellowstone opposite the mouth of the Tongue River, their every breath was a greasy vapor in the winter air.
Tullock stepped around the warriors and that scatter of robes as Waits-by-the-Water set Magpie on the floor of pounded earth. As soon as she pulled back the deep hood of her blanket capote, three of the warriors instantly recognized her. She settled onto a small wooden crate, tearing at the knot in the sash around her waist. Bass held out his hand to the trader.
Tullock shook with him, affectionately laying his frozen club of a left hand on Titus’s forearm. “I ain’t seen a white face in weeks.”
“Down to ronnyvoo, one of them brigades made plans to spend the winter over on the Powder,” Titus explained as he tore open his heavy coat and dragged it from his arms. “Figgered they’d been through here a’fore now on their way to winter camp.”
Tullock shook his head and took a step back. With a sigh the former trapper said, “Good to see a white man every now and then. Likely them company boys come through eventual’, if’n they’re in this country. Coffee?”
“Some for both of us, thankee.” Scratch watched the trader turn and step around the pile of robes, moving behind the group of warriors who had stepped over to chatter with Waits. He caught every third word or so, fast as they were talking—happy and animated. It made his heart glad to see such a smile on her face, hear that cheer in her voice. Back among her own kind.
“Trading been good?” he asked as Tullock handed a cup down to Waits, passed a second to Titus.
“Spring was a mite slow,” he admitted. “But it’s been picking up here of late now that the cold has come for certain.”
“So you ain’t been hurt none closing down your old place and moving over here?”
“Near as I can tell, these fellas say their people gonna bring in their furs no matter what.”
The steam of his coffee warmed his face as Scratch held it beneath his chin. “These Absorkees ain’t got nowhere else to go, Sam’l. They ain’t about to ride north through Blackfoot country to trade at the Marias post, so if you wasn’t here—they’d be banging on the gates of Fort Union for powder and coffee.”
“It ain’t powder and coffee these bucks come for,” Tullock growled. “They don’t believe I ain’t got no whiskey.”
Titus snorted with laughter and glanced over at Magpie standing at her mother’s knee, gazing up at the warriors. He sensed that the girl must realize how those men looked more like her than did her father.
“Whiskey, is it? Ain’t that just what we taught ’em? We done our best to make these poor niggers want what’s the wust for ’em.”
“You was down on the Green?”
“Yup, a hot, dry one too, that was.”
“What’s news from ronnyvoo?” Tullock asked. “Last boat of the year, word down from Union said St. Louis has gone and bought up ever’thing.”
After sipping at the scalding coffee, Titus declared, “Your outfit owns the hull mountains now. It be a’tween you and Hudson’s Bay.”
The trader patted, then settled back against a stack of folded buffalo robes. “Beaver’s ’bout done.”
“I ain’t give up, Sam’l. Gonna ride this horse till it drops dead a’tween my legs.”
“What brings you here to the Tongue?” Tullock asked. “You been trapping nearby?”
“Been up the Rosebud, hung round the big bend for a few weeks till I trapped it out and weren’t wuth the trouble putting my steel in water. We moseyed north for the Yallerstone. Aiming to make it downriver to Fort Union. Look up an old friend.”
“Who that be?”
“Levi Gamble. You hear of him?”
“Never thought you’d know Levi,” the trader responded, stepping over to the ill-fitting door to brush away some of the snow sifting in around the jamb. “A fair man, good of heart too. Gamble’s been out here longer’n most.”
Nodding, Bass replied, “Met him back in Caintuck when he was on his way to St. Lou. Gonna meet up with Lisa and ride up the river for to be a beaver hunter.”
“That man’s got him some rings, all right,” Tullock declared with his back turned.
“Didn’t ever figger to run onto him,” Scratch admitted. “It’s been over twenty-five year now.”
The trader turned from the door as the wind keened all the more loudly, rattling the crude planks, whining as it shinnied through the chinking, moaning as it sulled around the sharp corners on this low-roofed log hut. “Figure
