Behind Titus, both Meek and Sweete were doubled over, roaring with laughter. At the walls of the brush fort, every one of those sixty-some trappers were screaming at the Blackfoot now, many gasping for breath as they guffawed and yelled, guffawed and bellowed some more. This was damn well about as much fun as a man could have before he went under.
When his rump and bare hands grew numb from the terrible cold, Bass finally stood, wheeled about, and raised the front tail of his war shirt, grabbing his crotch.
“This here’s a man!” he shrieked at the enemy. “You ain’t got a pecker like me ’cause you’re all women!”
“Women afraid to fight!” Sweete cried behind him.
Eventually Titus picked his coat out of the snow, buckling the belt around it, then turned again, bent over, and gave his rump one last slap before he slowly trudged back to the breastworks—accompanied by the hoots and hollers and uproarious cheers of those sixty-one other men.
At the walls Meek and Sweete slapped him on the shoulders, teary-eyed, they were laughing so hard. “Up with him!” Shad ordered.
With that the two of them firmly seized the smaller man and hoisted Titus high into the air. Confused for a moment, Bass thrashed as Meek and Sweete stepped directly under him, settling the skinny man atop their shoulders where he caught his balance.
The cheering grew even louder as two dozen more emerged from that narrow gap in the breastworks, pushing back on it to carve an entrance wide enough for those who carried Bass aloft. Many of the trappers were already growing hoarse from shouting and laughing so lustily in the dry cold air, surging around Meek and Sweete, some bending over and slapping their own rumps to copy how Bass had taunted the enemy.
Back inside the breastworks, Sweete and Meek started around in a wide circle, still carrying Titus on their shoulders, when Bridger suddenly hollered above the clamor.
“Someone’s fat is in the fire, boys!”
The noise ended abruptly and Scratch leaped to the snow, hurrying to the wall with the others.
The warriors were parting slightly, allowing that warrior in the white blanket to step through their numbers. Halfway between the Blackfoot and the breastworks he came to a halt and began to wave his arms.
First one, then another, of the white men translated the chief’s gestures.
“Says they ain’t gonna fight!”
“Can’t fight us today.”
More signs were made.
“Gonna go back to his village now!”
Shaking his head in wonder, Scratch reflected, “You s’pose them Blackfoot figgered that red sky over their camp was bad medicine for ’em?”
Sweete snorted with a gust of raw mirth and said, “It sure weren’t your skinny ass what scared ’em off!”
As the white men watched in fascination, the chief turned aside and started across the bottom ground for the slopes bordering the valley, starting west for the Three Forks of the Missouri. At the same time less than half of the warriors began to move away in the opposite direction, marching downriver to the east.
“That bunch ain’t going back home,” Meek commented sourly.
“This gotta be a trick,” Ebbert said.
“We’ll wait ’em out and see,” Bridger declared.
A few minutes later, as the last of the Blackfoot were disappearing around a bend in the Yellowstone, Sweete came up and threw his arm around Bass’s shoulder. “You scared ’em off with that bony ass of your’n, Scratch.”
Thin-lipped and melancholy, Bass wagged his head. He pointed downriver. “Not that bunch, Shad. They ain’t running off for home. Them niggers is making for Crow country.”
20
Not trusting the Blackfoot any farther than he could throw one, Jim Bridger had his brigade maintain their vigilant watch across the next three days, wary that the enemy would lay a trap for the unsuspecting whites. Then, on the fourth day, Bridger called for a small detachment of volunteers to venture from their breastworks and reconnoiter the surrounding countryside for sign of the war party.
Joe Meek, Kit Carson, and the others returned at twilight to report they hadn’t seen a warrior. But what they had found sure made them grateful those northern lights had spooked the Blackfoot.
“Joe’s the one with some proper learning, so he ciphered it out,” Carson explained. “When we come across all them war lodges that bunch had downriver, we could make out how each one was big enough to hold least ten men. Meek went to counting straightaway … and he tallied up enough of them timber lodges to make for twelve hunnert warriors!”
But for that deserted encampment of conical brush, branch, and log shelters, there wasn’t another sign of the Blackfoot. Six days after the enemy had abandoned the country, Bridger’s brigade crossed the Yellowstone at the mouth of Clark’s Fork and started east. Bass marched with them those first few days until they reached Pryor Creek where he hailed his farewells. The sixty-one would push east for the Bighorn with plans to hunt buffalo while Scratch turned Samantha downstream to look for the Crow camp, anxious to rejoin his family.
That spring, after caching their winter goods, Scratch took Waits-by-the-Water, Magpie, and the infant boy north for the Musselshell country where the beaver grew sleek, their pelts much darker than anywhere to the south. At the site where he had been mauled by a sow grizzly seven years before, Bass sat beside the river with his family and the old dog, burned some sage and sweetgrass in a small fire at their feet, then smoked his pipe while the boy nursed in his mother’s arms. Here in this place, with the sleepy child’s tummy filled, Titus decided the time had come for him to name his son.
“For a long, long time,” he told Magpie, who sat in his lap, “I thought I should name your little brother isappe.”
“Woodtick?” his wife asked, looking up as she removed her glistening nipple from the sleeping child’s mouth.
Bass grinned as he looked up at his wife, nodding. “Isn’t he always sucking at you? Just the way a fat little tick sucks blood till he’s so full he falls right off to wait for another deer to walk past.”
Magpie looked closely at her baby brother as he slept, then watched as Waits slipped her breast back inside her dress. With a giggle she looked back at her sleeping brother. “Woodtick. That is a good name, popo.”
“But I will not give him that name,” Scratch corrected, resetting her on one of his knees as Zeke laid his chin on Bass’s other leg. “Next, I thought he should be named for a bird—just like his sister.”
“Yes!” Magpie cried exuberantly. “What bird?”
“Ischi’kiia,” he replied. “Snowbird.”
Waits smiled. “You thought of this because he is our winter baby?”
“Yes,” Scratch declared. “For a long time I thought it would be good to name our children for birds—because they are about as free as any animal I know.”
But Waits asked, “You don’t want to call him Snowbird?”
“No.” Titus wagged his head. “Later I finally figured out our son should have a name that wouldn’t cause other children to make fun of him when he grows a little bigger and starts to play with other youngsters in the Crow village. For a boy, better that it be a strong name.”
“What did you decide for him?” his wife asked.
Waits gazed down at their son. “Little Flea?”
“Look at him,” he explained. “See how he clings to you, just like a flea clings to a dog.”
“That is what every child does to its mother,” Waits explained.
Then Scratch continued. “When Flea gets old enough to understand, I want to give him a white name.”
Magpie looked up into her father’s face and asked, “Why do that?”
“I want to give my children the sort of name a white child would have.”
