2
“Maybe I should catch this strange-looking fish!”
At her giggle Bass turned his head to find his wife standing among the willows on the creekbank. “You already caught your fish, woman. Come in with me—the water feels almost as good as you this morning.”
Before ever worrying about breakfast this morning, he had tagged along with her to a secluded part of the stream where she would have a little privacy to bathe the baby. There he tied off their two horses while Waits-by- the-Water pushed through a gap in the willows to reach the edge of the creek where she found a small strip of open ground covered with grass, shaded by some young cottonwood saplings.
As she began to unwind all the swaddling wrapped around the child, he pulled off his grimy calico shirt, moccasins, and leggings, then dropped his breechclout on the bank before tiptoeing into the cool water. Finding it cold enough that morning to make him shiver with those first few steps, Titus finally eased himself beneath the surface until he sat submerged, water lapping up to his shoulders.
But he was standing now, scrubbing his skinny legs with creek-bottom sand, when she called him an odd- looking fish.
Scratch stopped, peered down, studying himself a moment there in the new day’s light. “You afraid to come in here and swim with this fish you caught?”
“Never did I realize how truly white you are for a white man!” she snorted, putting her fingers over her lips to stifle a giggle.
Looking down at himself again, Titus had to agree. His legs might see the sun only once a year, come his annual rendezvous scrubbing. From his neck up and his wrists down, the man was tanned brown as a twice-smoked Kentucky ham. But the rest of his skinny, scarred, bony body was about as pale as a translucent winter moon.
“Downright stupefying, ain’t I?” he said in English as he worked at scrubbing that second leg before settling back into the stream.
Waits had finished pulling off all the fouled grass and moss she had packed around the baby’s genitals at sundown the night before, and now held the girl just above the surface of the water to gently wash the child’s skin. Finally she laid the infant back on the blankets, patted the child dry, then leaned over to yank up long blades of summer-cured grass from the bank. These clumps of dry stalks she placed under the girl’s bottom, packed them between the child’s legs, then methodically rewrapped the long sections of cloth and, finally, an antelope hide around her daughter’s body.
Once done with that, Waits-by-the-Water returned the bundled child to the open flaps of the small cradleboard as the girl began to fuss. Watching her care for their child there on the bank, Titus smiled, enjoying the round fullness of her rump as it strained against her leather dress, the way her full breasts swayed against the buckskin yoke as she knotted the cradleboard strings.
“You coming, woman?”
Picking up the cradleboard, then settling cross-legged on the bank, Waits pulled aside the loose dress sleeve and partially exposed a breast, guiding it into the girl’s mouth. “As soon as she has eaten some more breakfast.”
“By the stars, woman—that child eats more than … more than—”
“More than you?” she interrupted with a big grin.
He slapped at the water with one hand. “Seems she’s eating most all the time.”
“That’s what babies do, husband. They eat and sleep, and mess their cradleboards too.” She looked at him a long moment, then gazed up- and downstream before she added, “As soon as she is asleep, I’ll join you. If no one will see me, I will come in to swim with you.”
That delicious anticipation was enough to slowly arouse him.
Once she had set the cradleboard aside to let the child sleep with her full tummy, Waits quickly yanked off her moccasins. Taking a moment to glance both ways along the creek, she hurriedly pulled her dress over her head and stepped off the bank, sucking in a gush of air as the sudden cold shocked her.
“You’ll get used to it. Come on over here,” he begged.
She settled beside him, then turned so that he could pull her back against his chest. There they sat in the middle of the creek as the valley gradually came alive on all sides of them. In the quiet of this early morning, it took little effort to hear sounds drifting from far-off trapper camps and Indian villages too: grumbling, hungover men, mothers scolding children in foreign tongues, the whinnying of horses and braying of mules, the crack of axes and the occasional boom of a rifle against the far bluffs where someone had gone in search of game.
Time was he had never seen a rendezvous sunrise unless he was stumbling back to his robes after a long, long night of liquoring and devilment. Many were the summers he drank himself into oblivion, hardly rousing from his stupor to vomit right where he lay, then passing right out again—repeatedly convincing himself he was having a fine time of it. After all, weren’t the rest of his friends doing the very same thing, day after day until the rendezvous was over and the traders headed east, or at least until he and his friends ran out of money and pelts and it was time to face down their hangovers, time to haul their aching heads back to the high country where they would work up enough plews to pay for another summer spree?
The last real drunk he’d given himself was no more than two summers before, back to Pierre’s Hole in thirty- two. By then the hangovers had begun to hurt him something terrible. And last year both he and Josiah took it easy on the whiskey, choosing not to punish the barleycorn that much, what with their both having new wives with them.
Wives. Most white folks just wouldn’t ever understand, he figured. There’d been no ceremony between him and Waits-by-the-Water. Hell, when he’d ridden off for the western sea more than a year and a half ago, Titus had gone to sulking and licking his wounds, figuring her vows of love weren’t worth much at all. But come the next spring—there she had been, tagging along with Josiah his own self, clearly intending to find Titus, to show him just how devoted she truly was.
No, there had been no civil-folks preacher to say the proper words over the two of them as they stood before their families and friends as they did back among the settlements. Such folks in the States would likely mule up their eyes and scrunch their lips in a sneer at the very thought that a man like him and a creature such as Waits could be so much in love that they would privately vow to one another every bit as strong as any white folks’ ceremony, promising they would be there until death ultimately parted them.
One more reason why he figured he’d made his last trip back east. St. Louis was in the past, and all those white folks too. Titus figured he wouldn’t live long enough to ever want to see settlements again, their sprawl stretching farther and farther west the way they always had.
Maybe he wouldn’t live long enough to see settlers and wagons, white women and preachers, reach the high plains, much less make it to the Shining Mountains. Why—a mountain man sure as hell ought’n die a’fore he had to witness such a goddamned confabulation as that! Damn if it wouldn’t likely pull the heart right out of a feller to see all this get ruin’t with settlers and civilizing.
By bloody damn, he prayed there’d still be plenty of wild in the wilderness, enough to last him all the rest of his days.
“You are going to see your tall friend this morning?” Waits asked him in a whisper as she gently scrubbed his grimy fingers one by one, scratching at the layers of grease and blood, grit and camp-black that had encrusted itself down deep into every knuckle, hardened into dark crescents at the base of every fingernail.
“Yes. Jarrell,” he said in English.
“Jer-rel,” she repeated.
“Jarrell Thornbrugh,” he completed the friend’s name with just the proper burr to the last name. “A John Bull Englishman.”
“That is more of his name?”
He chuckled and explained in Crow, “Just Jarrel Thornbrugh. Englishman is where he’s from, what he is. Like I’m American from the States, and you’re a Crow from Absaroka.”
“It was good to have a friend near when death loomed close last summer,”* she reflected.
“He saved our lives,” Bass agreed. “Saved Josiah’s life. Mine too.”
“This man, he comes to trade his furs like you?”
