on the Blackfoot to rub them out.
“Goddamn ’em and their war songs,” Sweete grumbled beside Scratch now. “They been playing them drums ever’ day they had us surrounded.”
While the intense cold settled into his every joint this evening of his second day within the breastworks, Titus had to admit those never-ending drums were starting to bother him too as the trappers sat in the fading glow of that winter twilight. Listening to the distant singing, shouts, and high-pitched shrieks, Bass chuckled and said, “You’re ’bout as grumpy as a bear ’thout your sleep, ain’cha?”
“Cain’t none of us sleep much since they showed up,” Bridger explained as he came up at a crouch. “Shad’s got good reason to be grumpy—he’s allays been the one made sure we always had half the boys awake while the rest got some shut-eye.”
Night fell on the Yellowstone valley, a second coming of darkness for Bass here among Bridger’s sixty. Men came and went around the fires burning at the bottom of pits scooped out of the sandy soil so none of them would be backlit as they moved about their fortress. More than two dozen of the men had already curled up in their robes near one or another of the ten fires, desperately trying for some sleep because they were scheduled to go on watch later that night.
Bass lay there in a cocoon of his own robes and blanket, shuddering until the fur finally warmed with his body’s heat. For the longest time he could not get comfortable enough to sleep, listening to the low voices of those keeping a watch at the walls, the snuffling of the cold animals gnawing on scraps of peeled cottonwood bark nearby, the crunch and whine of footsteps made upon the trampled snow. And through it all he thought of Waits- by-the-Water, how she was faring with Magpie and her newborn brother.
He wondered when the First Maker would show him a name for the child, then brooded that he might never make it back to the Crow village to give that name to the boy.
There wasn’t a man among those sixty-two of them who didn’t know the deck was stacked against them. At his last count Bridger announced there had to be more than a thousand Blackfoot ready to charge the breastworks. Chances were the warriors had worked themselves up with the singing and dancing and drum pounding for better than three days so they’d attack in the morning—the fourth. Plenty of horses and guns, powder and blankets to win as the spoils of battle when they wiped out the white men.
He thought about how grim the mood had become just that afternoon as the sun sank in the west and the trappers saw just how clear that terrible night would be, driving the temperatures far below zero. It grew so cold the water in the trees froze, and they began to pop. From time to time through the night a big cottonwood split as the cold continued to plummet—booming like that throaty twelve-pounder at Fort Union when it had raked through the cabins where the Deschamps clan took cover. Smaller trees popped like the smoothbores these Blackfoot traded off the English north in Canada.
How he wished he were back beside his woman. Smelling her skin, feeling himself grow hard and hot against her flesh. How he missed her. How he would miss her if this were the end.
Scratch knew he had to stay there among friends who were glad to have one more man, one more gun. If these men were going to hunker down to the bitter end, taking as many of the bastards as they could with then) when the end came … then Bass decided he belonged there.
After all, there was no better place for a man to reach the end of his string than among his fellows. No better time to have his candle snuffed out than in giving his life while protecting his friends—
“Bass!” the voice whispered sharply in his ear.
Instantly coming out of the thick fog of sleep, blinking his eyes, ripping back the buffalo robe, and poking his face into the cold blackness, he found Osborne Russell kneeling over him.
“Bridger sent me for you.”
His mouth was as pasty as the scum of bear tallow at the bottom of a week-old kettle. “Yeah,” he groaned. “Bridger—”
Suddenly Titus realized something was different.
The whole damned fortress was bathed in an eerie crimson light. The pale-red glow shimmered and pulsed, turning Russell’s face, his squat beaver hat, the upturned collar of his buffalo coat … everything tinged red as fresh blood.
Titus was scared right down to his marrow. But it wasn’t the cold that made him shiver as he kicked off the robes and blanket to stand.
“W-where’s he?” His teeth chattered, clacking more from fright than cold. Scratch admitted he hadn’t been this scared since Asa McAfferty had first chattered about hoodoos and malevolent spirits slipping through that crack in the sky from the other side of existence.
“C’mon,” Russell said as he snugged his hat down over his ears.
There wasn’t a man asleep now. Every one of the sixty-one either stood watching the sky, or sat dumbfounded in his robes, having been awakened by the others.
“How long this been going on?” Titus asked with a gulp.
Meek turned at his approach. “Just started.”
“Damn, it’s almost purty,” Scratch whispered quietly. “If’n it didn’t scare the piss outta me.”
Then he realized he did need to relieve himself and turned away to the breastworks. He urinated on the brush, not once taking his eyes off the dancing, shimmering lights that slowly extended their crimson paint across more and more of the northern sky.
“Ever you see something like this?” Sweete asked as Bass stepped up beside him.
He wagged his head.
“Neither’ve I,” Bridger agreed.
“Damn! Lookee there!” Levin Mitchell exclaimed nearby.
At the very center of the corona the lights no longer merely pulsed. Now to the east of north, bands of crimson lights began to stream skyward from the edge of the earth—brilliant fingers of red, rust, orange, and blood-tinted gold. Every streamer of color wavering, pulsing, expanding, and diminishing, then expanding again as the trappers murmured among themselves.
“Listen,” Bass said after a long time of watching the heavens.
“To what?” Meek asked.
“I don’t hear a thing,” Russell commented.
“That’s just it,” Titus told them. “I ain’t heard them goddamned drums since you come woke me.”
“I believe Scratch is right,” Bridger declared. “Sons of bitches ain’t pounding and dancing no more.”
“They see’d this sky too.”
“Bound to, Scratch,” Shad said. “Lookee there—them red lights are brightest over in their part of the sky, off to the east yonder.”
For a long time Titus brooded on the heavenly show, then said, “This here gotta be some big medicine to them Blackfoot, fellas. The way Injuns read sign—this bound to be ’bout the biggest medicine any of them niggers ever laid eyes on.”
In all his natural-born days, this eerie display of the northern lights had to be the most frightening exhibition of celestial fire he had ever witnessed. Up to this moment the most dramatic night phenomenon he had seen had been back in the autumn of thirty-three, when the sky rained fire. One shooting star after another, a handful at a time, almost from the moment the sky grew dark enough to spot the starry trails right on till dawn when the coming light made the sky grow so pale the meteor shower was no longer visible.
Remembering how Josiah’s little boy had cried with wonder and fear that night … Joshua.
Bass wondered on him now. The child would be … close to four years old. Walking and talking, likely riding a horse too. How he hoped Josiah had fared well down there in Taos with Matthew Kinkead and that free man, Esau.
Safer there were they all than he up here in Crow country where the damned Blackfoot had come to raid.
He whispered a curse on that thousand surrounding Bridger’s brigade, a breathless curse on their women and children, on their old and on their young who would grow into warriors, an especially hearty curse on their women —for it was they who gave birth to generations of fighting men.
“What did you say?” Sweete asked, stepping over.
He immediately realized he had been muttering in a whisper. “Just asking God to do something for me is
