cramp swept over her. Crane moved up to take her elbow, to steady her as Waits said, “But … your child will not wait any longer.”
“This one is so big!” the elderly Horse Woman announced as her bony fingers pushed, prodded, squeezed the belly.
Waits groaned from the ripping torment within, the stabbing of the fingers without.
“Sit up now, woman,” Horse Woman commanded.
Together Crane and the old midwife each pulled on an arm to bring Waits to a sitting position.
The old one asked, “Do you want to push?”
“Y-y-yes!” she gasped as the next fiery rush of pain crossed her belly. Crane pulled one arm, then the other, from the blue wool dress they had borrowed from a large family friend. It hung around her neck as she shuddered with the passing of that long tongue of fire coursing through the center of her.
She knew it would be soon. Her body shuddering with the easing of the contraction, Waits remembered when Magpie was born in that land far, far to the south. “Whwhere is Magpie?”
Crane explained, “She is with my sister’s family. I told her she will have a baby brother or sister to play with before the sun sets on another day.”
Growling with the flush of another fiery tensing, Waits blinked away some of the tears in her eyes and watched the old wrinkled woman crawl up close before her with a long stake in her hand, a hand-sized stone in the other. Horse Woman drove it into the bare ground inches from Waits’s knees, in front of the robe she had been sitting upon.
“Hold on to this,” the midwife demanded, taking both of the young woman’s wrists in her bony hands and yanking them away from the bare, swollen belly, pulling them toward the stake.
“Hold on—then you can push,” Crane added.
They pulled the blue dress up and off her head, then quickly draped an old, much-used blanket over her shoulders, stuffing part of it between her shaking legs, beneath her where spots of blood began to appear. Horse Woman and Crane both bent so low, their cheeks rubbed the floor of the lodge, peering between the young mother’s thighs.
“He comes!” Crane cried out in joy. “He comes now!”
Suddenly Waits was blowing like a horse after a long run as the pain rumbled through her like a swollen knot that grew bigger, ever bigger. Then she felt as if she were being torn in half and could not think of how she could save herself—
“Its head is here,” Horse Woman announced gruffly.
Waits was so faint, gasping with such shallow breaths, wondering how she could hold on to the stick any longer—
“You are almost done,” Crane cooed beside her daughter, her arm around her shoulders, whispering in her ear. “Remember Magpie. Remember that this will be over soon.”
“One more push,” Horse Woman demanded. She was hunched over between Waits-by-the-Water’s knees, crouching there with her hands supporting the newborn’s head. “One more—and this child will be here to see you.”
Starting to groan with the recognition of that next tensing, Waits felt the pain rise like a crack of far-off thunder within her, shoving its way into her throat like summer lightning before it pushed downward with a sudden clap. She was sure this huge child was ripping her apart as the fire became more than she could bear.
Shuddering, trembling, suddenly collapsing onto her bottom, Waits found she had no more strength left. This child would have to do the rest on its own—
The baby cried.
Blinking again, Waits swiped at her eyes swimming in tears, peering at the old midwife crouched between her knees. The gray head pulled back, the nearly toothless mouth grinned, the baggy eyes smiling anew. She held up the tiny squalling newborn, legs and arms pumping, its head thrashing side to side. Down its belly her eyes dropped quickly, finding that purplish white life cord attached to its belly.
Pushing the life cord aside, Horse Woman held the child up for the young mother’s close examination. “See, woman?”
Crane was sobbing, her face swimming into view through Waits’s tears. “You have a boy!”
Breathless, Waits whispered in a weary gush, “Ti-tuzz … has a boy.”
19
“I think you should’ve hightailed it outta here while you had your chance, Scratch,” Jim Bridger huffed as he scurried up in a crouch.
Bass watched his old friend settle in beside him at the breastworks. “And leave you boys to have all this fun?”
At Titus’s other elbow Shadrach Sweete said, “Maybeso we ought lay back on Titus, Gabe. I been jab-bin’ him ’bout it since he come running in here.”
“I don’t rightly think you’re an idjit,” Bridger declared with a grim smile. “Just figgered you for more sense when it comes to fighting Blackfoot.”
“I fit my share of the bastards, that’s for certain,” Titus said. “Ain’t had a year in these mountains what Bug’s Boys hasn’t troubled me and mine.”
“I tol’t Titus he could still slip off when it gets dark tonight,” Sweete explained.
“Shadrach,” Bass said with a grin and a doleful wag of his head, “you goddamn well know them red niggers got us surrounded, so there ain’t no slipping off come dark for any coon.”
“The man’s right, Shad,” Bridger agreed. “There ain’t gonna be no leaving for any of us now. If there’s gonna be a fight with all these here bastards—I for one am sure as hell glad to have Titus Bass and his guns here with us.”
Scratch nodded at Gabe with appreciation. That simple gesture was all the thanks he needed to express for those words from an old friend. Sweete himself patted Bass on the shoulder, then turned to the side, staring over the brush and log breastworks the brigade had hastily thrown up the day before.
The very day Titus had ridden into the brigade camp, making a midwinter’s social call on old friends.
For hundreds of miles around, the land lay locked in winter, frozen and silent. From time to time over the last couple of months Scratch had ventured out to try trapping one river or another, believing that he would find some beaver out of their lodges. But with the hard freeze that held on week after week, even the Yellowstone had turned to ice.
Restless as a deerfly in high summer, Titus finally decided he would mosey upriver to visit Bridger’s camp. Before the hard freeze had descended upon this country, Scratch had bumped into some of Gabe’s men scouting for sign of beaver a few miles up Pryor Creek from the Crow village. They had informed him where the brigade had made its camp on the north side of the Yellowstone, just west of the mouth of Rock Creek—no more than a long day’s ride from the mouth of the Pryor.
A week later he had hugged Magpie, kissed Waits-by-the-Water, and given the little boy-child a squeeze before he was off. Sometimes a man just needed to move.
At first Scratch had smelled the wood smoke, then spotted the gray tatters of it clinging among the tops of the leafless cottonwoods upriver. From the sideslope of a hill he had spotted the brigade’s camp no more than two miles ahead. It was late of the afternoon, which meant he was saddle weary, hungry, and half-froze for coffee, not to mention how keenly he anticipated the palaver and storytelling they’d do around the fire that night.
He had nudged Samantha into a brisk walk, reining her down the gentle slope toward the bottomland where he lost sight of the camp as he emerged from the brush along the south bank of the Yellowstone and dismounted. He had dropped the reins and stepped onto the ice by himself. A good ten yards out he stopped, then jumped and stomped, assured the stuff was thick enough for them both.
Skirting some spongy patches, Bass had gotten the mule to the north bank, the wood smoke grown all the stronger in his nostrils, when his ears caught a sound that shouldn’t have been on that cold wind. Not that trappers didn’t yelp and whoop and holler themselves when they took a notion to … but those voices sure didn’t sound like
