nothing but some hunter who found himself caught out in the storm and quickly erected a crude windbreak, such a shelter would be more than the four of them had right then anyway.
Too—he considered—a praying man might beg God that they would find a fire glowing inside a Crow lodge where they could huddle out of the wind while the storm exhausted itself just beyond their sanctuary of poles and buffalo hides. But then he admitted that Titus Bass never had been the sort to get down on his prayer bones and taffy up to the Lord the way his mam had tried to teach her young’uns to do.
But at times like these when a man simply could do no more on his own to protect those he loved, when it was simply beyond his own power … then he supposed it wouldn’t hurt to see if the All-Maker was listening. Just as long as the four of them made it to shelter and lived out the storm, as long as this storm didn’t take his wife, or his daughter, or that little baby boy, Bass promised he would do anything in return. All God had to do was show him what was expected.
A man what didn’t spend much of his time listening to anything the Almighty had to say wasn’t the sort of man who could easily read the All-Maker’s sign. Not like Asa McAfferty—now, that was a fella who could cipher the Lord’s word plain as sun. But someone like Titus Bass might well be hard-pressed to figure out when God was talking to him, or even what tongue the Everywhere Spirit chose to speak in.
Nonetheless, if God saw his family through, Bass vowed he would do his best to be attentive to what God might ask in return, where- or whenever.
As strong as the fragrant tang of wood smoke grew in his sore, drippy nostrils, Scratch believed they had to be getting close. Step by step, stronger and stronger.
At times it became difficult to keep the bank of the Tongue close by on their right, what with the way the trees and willow forced them to ride several yards from the riverbank, sweeping slowly this way and that as they needled their way through the underbrush. The pack ponies began to protest now, pulling back on Samantha— making her bray in distress or anger at the way they were attempting to turn about and flee in the face of the brutal wind. For a moment he stopped, just long enough to loop the mule’s rope twice around his left wrist, clutching Magpie against him with his right arm, the pony’s reins held short and tight in that right hand as he struggled to get the horse started again into the teeth of the storm.
Out of the swirling gray gloom leaped the flickering glow of the fire, a corona of yellow glittering in the midst of the wavering, white-diamond air as snowflakes darted about in wispy, wind-driven trails. As they approached, Titus could tell that the fire had been huge not so long ago, nearly a bonfire fed by huge trunks and limbs of downfall someone had dragged to this small riverbank clearing. But now the man-high inferno had whipped itself so furiously that the firewood was nearly exhausted and on the verge of dying.
No one here to attend it. Like a beacon lit, then abandoned.
For barely a moment as he halted the exhausted pony again, Titus spotted two meat-drying racks erected back against the cottonwoods … then the blackened crowns of those small rocks arranged in a crude fire-ring where a lodge might once have stood. Injuns.
Should he stop here—get the three of them down by that fire—then push on by himself into the teeth of the storm?
There on the far side of the fire, that wall of ten-foot willow offered the only windbreak he could see in the fury of wind and snow. Right where those who had abandoned this place had raised their lodge. Perhaps Waits could huddle with the children beneath the three robes he could drape over them, waiting there for his return as the snow continued to build.
When he kicked the pony in the flanks, the animal failed to move. It shuddered the next time he kicked it with the heels of his ice-crusted buffalo-fur moccasins. A third hammer to its ribs finally got the animal lunging away a hoof at a time, slowly stepping around the perimeter of that dying fire, flames wildly licking up the huge logs, sparks spewing from the rotted wood like muzzle blasts, quickly swallowed by the wind, extinguished by the cold like galaxies of dying fireflies—given life in one breath, gone with the next.
On the far side of the fire, upwind, he tugged back on the reins and twisted stiffly in the saddle, his left arm wooden as he raised Samantha’s rope, clumsily trying to find the pony’s lead rope he had looped beneath his belt.
As the wind battered the side of his face, Scratch searched and dug at the side of his elk-hide coat. His cold mind slowly grasped the horror: the pony’s rope was gone! It had somehow disappeared, dragged from his belt without his realizing it—
“W-waits!” he cried hoarsely in English. Even as the word escaped his lips, it was swept away by the gale, swallowed by the keening wind.
“Popo?”
Swallowing hard, he whispered to his daughter, “I’m calling your mother.”
“Is mother there?”
“Y-yes,” he lied again, feeling his eyes pool.
“And little brother?”
“Yes, Magpie.”
God, I told you I would do anything you asked. Spare them. And if you must take any of us, then see they live and you can take me.
Her voice drenched in anguish, the girl whimpered, “I want my mother.”
“Hush, now, Magpie,” he scolded her sharply, angry and bitter at himself as much as he was angry and bitter with the All-Maker. “There’s a fire here where I can get you warm.”
“And my mother too.”
“Yes, daughter—”
“Ti-tuzz!”
Her raspy voice slipped through a lull in the wind a frozen heartbeat before her shadowy, ghostly form loomed out of the blizzard.
“Woman!”
“Ti-tuzz!”
Bending his head down, Bass reassured his daughter, “Your m-mother is here.”
She was sobbing against his breast. “Now you can get all of us warm.”
“Yes,” he gasped as he turned the pony around, watching the black form inch closer. “Now I promise to warm all of you.”
He dropped the mule’s lead rope and held out his left arm, so crusted it felt as if he had been lifting a thick stump of cottonwood. She brought her pony to a halt at his left side, leaning against him beneath that arm, sobbing.
“I thought I’d lost you in the storm,” he said, rubbing that flap of the buffalo robe where her head was buried in the crusted fur. Then he heard the faint whimper of the baby.
“The boy, he is cold. I know he is scared too,” she pleaded as she drew back the fur and tried to gaze up at his face in the storm.
“There is a fire where you and the children can stay while I go in search of shelter. You will be safe here till I can come back for—”
“We will be safe with you.”
“The animals are tired,” he begged her. “Better that I go on alone. I don’t want to lose any of you to the cold and wind.”
She interrupted, “Bu’a, out there minutes ago, I knew we would not die. My heart knew to believe in you. We will go with you.”
Instantly his heart rose to his throat. “No. You must do as I say. Trust me and stay here. I will be back —”
That’s when he dimly realized he was still smelling the wood smoke.
Bass immediately twisted in the saddle, away from his wife, turning his face into the wind once more— sniffing the terrible, metallic teeth of the fury heavy with moisture. Water. Nothing but a dry winter storm that had just crossed a wide river on these high, desertlike plains could smell quite like that.
Yet how was it that the beckoning fragrance of that wood smoke remained strong in his nostrils now that he stood upwind of this abandoned fire?
There had to be another fire to the north. Close to the Yellowstone that relinquished its wind-whipped froth
