The girl scrambled to her feet there before him, taking some of his beard in each of her tiny hands and holding her face close to his. “Are you going to give me a white name too?”
“I thought I would, one day when you grow bigger, Magpie,” he confirmed. “But I won’t if you are still happy with your Crow name.”
She thought about that for a while, then said, “No. I like Magpie. It feels like it should be my name. Maybe when I am older, you can give me a white name. But while I am a little girl, I am Magpie.”
He grinned. “That’s just how I feel about it too.” And gave her a squeeze. “Go sit with your mother.”
When he took the boy in his arms and Magpie settled in her mother’s lap, Titus said a prayer for them all, asking for a special blessing on the child he was giving the name Flea. When he was done with that simple ceremony, Bass was content to hold the sleeping child across his arms as the air warmed that late afternoon, birds chirping in the budding branches overhead.
After sitting in the exquisite silence for a long time, her daughter dozing in her lap, Waits asked, “Do you think Magpie will marry a white man?”
“In many ways, I hope she doesn’t,” he eventually admitted.
“But my life with you has been very good,” Waits declared. “If I had married a Crow man, I would not travel as far as I have, nor would I see anywhere near as much as I do with you.”
“Doesn’t it make your life harder to stay on the move with your white husband?”
She grinned and shook her head. “No—life would be much, much harder with a Crow husband. A white man takes care of his wife much better, and he treats his woman much better too.”
“Then you hope Magpie finds a white man to marry?”
Nodding, Waits said, “Not just any white man. If she can find a man as good as her father, then I want her to marry him.”
Aroused from her brief nap, the little girl stretched, then toddled over to her father and clasped her arms around one of his. “Maybe you marry me when I grow up, popo?”
He laughed a little and hugged her close. “I can’t marry you because I am your father. But I can make sure that the man who does marry you will treat you just as good as I treat your mother.”
“Then I won’t marry anyone. I will always live with you and my mother,” Magpie vowed.
Bass grinned at Waits. “Maybe you should tell our daughter that there will come a day when she will be very anxious to leave us so she can go live with a young man.”
“There is no sense in explaining that to her anytime soon, bu’a,” she replied with a grin. “Soon enough your daughter will find out about men all on her own.”
Marching south from the Musselshell after a successful spring hunt, they recrossed the Yellowstone early that summer, hurrying through the lengthening days, putting every mile they could behind them, riding from dawn’s first light until dusk forced them to stop for the night. Striking the Bighorn, they continued on down the Wind River to swing around the far end of the mountains where they crossed the Southern Pass. On its western slope they struck New Fork, following it to its mouth, then turned north on the Green to reach Horse Creek, site of that summer’s rendezvous.
From the high benchland he could see that the Nez Perce were already there, their village raised in a horseshoe bend of the twisting creek beyond the scattered camps of company and free men.
“Where are the many?” Waits asked.
“Didn’t figger us for coming in early,” he told her in English, his eyes narrowing with concern. “Trader ain’t come in yet neither.”
“I am tired of the long journey,” she told him. “We’ll stay awhile. Wait for the trader.”
“Yes,” he said, relieved to know she wasn’t impatient after the long journey. “I promised you a new copper kettle. We’ll wait for the trade goods.”
Beyond the first few camps of free men, he ran across the sprawling settlement of lean-tos and blanket bowers where the company men sat out these midsummer days, watching the east for signs of the caravan. Just beyond Bridger’s brigade Bass found a small copse of trees that would do while they joined the wait. After a day occupied with setting up their shelters and dragging in some wood from down the valley, he spent a morning untying the rawhide whangs from his packs of fur, dusting and combing each pelt for vermin, then carefully repacking them until it came time for the St. Louis men to attach a value to his year’s labor.
By afternoon it was time to ride over to look up those friends who had shared a cold winter siege with him along the Yellowstone. Zeke settled in the shade with him as Kit Carson, Joe Meek, Shad Sweete, and others came up to have themselves some palaver and a little of what whiskey remained in the American Fur Company kegs.
“Jehoshaphat!” Bass growled as his cup was filled, looking round at those company trappers who hadn’t been with Bridger’s men last winter on the Yellowstone. “If the sight of them Blackfoot skedaddling wasn’t call for ol’ Gabe to pour out a extra ration of Pratte and Chouteau’s whiskey!”
Holding the small keg beneath one arm and doing the pouring now, Sweete added, “Damn me, boys—but this child won’t ever again have me cause to get likkered up on one poor cup!”
The two of them were holding court there beside the Green River that hot July day, eighteen and thirty- seven, telling and retelling the tale of that just-about battle with those Blackfoot some twelve hundred strong. One bunch after another of Andrew Drips’s brigade showed up to hear the story of when one white man’s bony rump turned back the biggest war party ever heard tell of in the mountains.
“More Injuns than ever these eyes see’d in one place,” Bridger testified.
One of Drips’s trappers regarded Bass warily, demanding, “You really the one showed his arse and made them Blackfeets run away?”
Before Titus could reply, Shad slammed a hand down on Scratch’s shoulder, sloshing some whiskey as he answered for Bass. “Just the sight of this coon’s arse turned them niggers’ hearts to water!”
Nearly every one of those doubters who came to hear the story looked Bass up and down, plainly struggling to believe the tale because Scratch wasn’t near so tall, nor anywhere as big, as Meek or Sweete. And besides— Titus was a damned sight older than every other trapper most knew out there in the mountains. The skeptical listeners clearly had trouble believing the story … until Carson or Meek, Sweete or Bridger, told them about those northern lights and that terrifying crimson sky.
A legend was a’borning—but all the more a tale about that frightening celestial display than a tale about one man pulling aside his breechclout to insult the enemy.
“Gabe!”
The whole bunch turned with that cry of alarm from Meek. Joe stood just beyond the circle of their shelters at the edge of the prairie, pulling a looking glass from his eye. More than a hundred men fell silent in a blink. That tone of warning and danger in the big man’s voice damn well didn’t belong at rendezvous. Here they came to relax among companions and friendlies. But those who remembered the deadly battle in Pierre’s Hole knew how quickly a summer’s tranquil stillness could be’ shattered.
“It’s them Bannocks again!” another man cried.
“Bannawks?” Grabbing Sweete by the arm, Bass demanded, “What’s going on?”
On Shad’s face was a look of murderous determination. “Trouble. You bring your gun?”
“Right over there. But I didn’t figger I’d ever—”
Bridger interrupted everything with his bellow. “Where them Nez Perce?”
“Over here!” George Ebbert answered.
“Keep ’em outta sight, Squire,” Bridger ordered. Turning round to the rest, he commanded, “Lick your flints and prime your pans, boys. This can’t be no social call.”
Not with the way those three dozen Bannock warriors were coming on at the gallop.
Unlike the rest of the suspicious trappers, Scratch kept expecting the horsemen to raise their rifles into the air, firing them in that universal sign of friendship upon approaching a camp.
“This ain’t gonna be good, Shad,” Bass said as he eased up beside the taller man. He quickly licked the pad of his thumb, ran it along the underside of the flint in the gun’s hammer to swab it clean of burned powder smudge. “S’pose you tell me what lit a fire under their asses.”
“Few days a’fore the Nepercy village ever come in for ronnyvoo, six of ’em come on ahead of the rest to find out for sure where the white men was camped. Them Bannocks already had their village on up Horse Crik, and some of their men run onto the Nepercy,” Shad began. “So those Bannocks up and took the Nepercy horses and most everything else they had too.”
