on you.”
And now, before this hushed crowd, Bass stepped back to the second horse, carefully raising the rolled-up blanket of a brilliant medium blue he had tied across its back. He carefully unknotted two rawhide straps that secured the blanket to a single braided-horsehair surcingle lashed around the horse’s middle.
Stopping before Strikes-in-Camp, the white man said, “And this blanket is for your mother. I hope that it will keep Crane warm when you are away to fight the enemies who killed her husband, the enemies who killed your father.”
The warrior touched the blue blanket, laying his palm on it where it rested across Bass’s forearms. “It is a good color. My mother will like this blanket.”
As Strikes-in-Camp pulled the blanket roll from the white man’s arms, a rifle emerged from the tube of blue wool. The stunned warrior froze with the blanket draped over his forearm, staring at the rifle.
“What is this you hide in the giveaway blanket?” Strikes-in-Camp asked. “Another present for my mother?”
Bass smiled, swallowed, his mind scratching to recall those words he had practiced. “This rifle is for the brother of the woman I want to take for my wife. A rifle for the man who is the head of her family now. May it kill many of our enemies, Strikes-in-Camp. This rifle …” And he stopped, dragging a long-barreled pistol from the wide, worn belt he had buckled around his elkhide coat. “And this short gun too.”
“It … it too?” the warrior asked in surprise.
Nodding, Titus continued. “Both are gifts for a brother-in-law I honor today as a brave and fearless warrior who stands between his people and their enemies.”
Like Strikes-in-Camp, the crowd was stunned into silence.
Quickly passing the blanket back to a comrade, the young warrior first took the pistol, giving it a cursory inspection before he stuffed it into the wide, colorful finger-woven wool sash knotted around his blanket capote.
Then with both hands Strikes-in-Camp took the smoothbore fusil from Bass’s arms with something resembling reverence. Those more-than-twenty other members of the Sore Lip Society crowded in on both sides, murmuring in admiration, touching the musket’s freshly oiled barrel, its gleaming stock, the graceful curve of the goose-necked hammer that clutched a newly knapped sliver of amber flint.
Scratch grew anxious, standing there before the warrior, waiting for some words to be spoken, something to be done. Had he gotten all the words right? Oh, how he had practiced and practiced them—
Suddenly Strikes-in-Camp leveled his eyes at the white man. “These gifts … they are truly fit for the daughter of a chief.”
“He-Who-Is-No-Longer-Here was not a chief,” Bass struggled with the words, tongue-tied and nervous as a field mouse cornered by the barn cat, “but she is the sister of a man who will be a chief someday.”
The warrior’s dark eyes actually smiled at the white man. “You came here to honor me, Pote Ani. But in many ways you have honored my whole family. And you have brought honor to our people. The Absaroka are known not only by the strength of our enemies—the Blackfoot, the Blood, Gros Ventre, and Lakota … but we are known by the strength of our friends: the white men who stand with us to fight our enemies.”
Laying the new rifle in the crook of his left elbow, Strikes-in-Camp reached out and seized Bass’s forearm with his right hand, clutching it fiercely.
“Now I go to bring my mother to this place. Together we will bring my sister to you. So that there can be what you call the promising. So that she becomes your wife before all our people.”
Before Bass could respond, Strikes-in-Camp had turned and was moving back through the crowd that parted for him.
It truly felt as if it took forever, more than an hour—although he realized it was but a matter of minutes before he heard the admiring rustle washing his way through the crowd. Yard by yard he watched the hundreds move aside, every one of them falling silent but for their hushed whispers. Finally those members of the Sore Lips stepped aside. Through their ranks emerged Strikes-in-Camp. Behind him stood Crane. Beside her, Waits-by-the- Water.
Titus gasped at her beauty.
Both wore their very best. His wife wore a blue wool dress he did not recognize, something big enough to fit over her swollen belly. Front and back across its heavy yoke were sewn the milk teeth of the elk. Red strips of ribbon were tied across its skirt, each tassel blowing gently with the winter breeze. And Waits had smeared the deep-purple vermilion not only in the part of her gleaming hair, but in a wide band that ran from her hairline down her forehead, continued down the bridge of her nose, and ended at the bottom of her chin. Two more purple lines started at the bottom of her eyes, dropped across the high cheekbones, then ended at the jawbones.
Scratch found her radiance so stunning that he had to remind himself to breathe.
Strikes-in-Camp moved aside; then Crane brought her daughter forward. Now Strikes-in-Camp’s wife, Bright Wings, stepped up behind him, the brilliant oxblood blanket around her shoulders. From her arm she took the new blue blanket, handing it to her husband. Strikes-in-Camp passed it on to the white man. Together they unfurled it, and the two of them laid it across Crane’s shoulders as the old woman gazed up into the white man’s face and smiled, her eyes misting.
Scratch could not remember the last time he had seen her smile. It had been so long ago, before Whistler had led the revenge raid on the Blackfoot. Then he realized that until today Crane had had no reason to smile.
With her new blue blanket wrapped about her shoulders, Crane reached out, took hold of her daughter’s hand, and raised it waist level, presenting the hand to the white man.
Without any urging Bass seized Waits’s hand—not sure of a sudden if he would remember all that he wanted to tell her, all that he had rehearsed saying before her family and her people.
“Among the white man, when two people want to share their lives together, they stand before their families, stand before their friends, stand before a holy man in the sight of the First Maker … and they give promises to the one they love.
“These promises are not a simple thing the two can easily ignore or leave behind, because their promising is a bond that the friends and family hear them make.”
He felt his eyes starting to sting with tears.
“I do not have any family to join me today. You and our children are my only family. But I have friends among your people—friends I trust to stand at my back when we fight our enemies. From this day on I hope to have many more friends among the Crow.”
“Before your family, here before your people—I make this promise: that I will protect you, provide for you, shelter you from storm and cold and hunger until I am no more. This promise I will keep all of my days, even unto my final day. Our children will not know want, nor will they know fear. Instead, they will know the love of their family until they are grown and leave us to walk a road of their own making.”
He reached up with a roughened fingertip and gently wiped that first, lone tear spilling from one of her eyes. Bass wasn’t sure how to read the look in them—so filled with love were they at one moment, filled with surprise at his words the next.
“I promise myself to you all the rest of my days,” he concluded. “I will be your husband. Will you be my wife, the mother of my children?”
Then he noticed how she was clenching her bottom lip between her teeth.
When she finally spoke, Waits-by-the-Water whispered, “I will be your wife, Ti-tuzz. Mother of your children. For all of our days—”
And he felt her grip him with tremendous force as she quivered slightly.
, Concerned, he said, “Waits-by-the-Water?”
“I must go with my mother now—”
“Your mother?”
Reaching up to touch his face with her fingertips, Waits’s eyes softened, and she said, “The rush of warm water has come, bu’a.” She looked down at her feet.
When he gazed at her moccasins below the edge of that blue wool dress, he saw the puddle softening the snow between her feet, how the moisture had soaked the bottom of her leggings and moccasins, how the pool of it steamed in the cold air.
“I promise you I will stand at your side for all the rest of your days,” she gasped, her face pinching as another
