to the storm.
“Come!” he cried. “Stay beside me. And talk to Flea! Keep talking to him so I can hear your voice and know your pony is staying near mine.”
Harder than ever now, he struggled to get the animals moving, horses that acted as if they were no longer ready to bolt from the teeth of the storm, but had decided they were giving up the fight and would die there. Yelling, lashing out with his icy moccasin, he goaded Waits’s pony and his own into lunging, uncertain steps as the white veil grew thicker around them, the wind no longer keening like a bitter, disembodied widow.
Now it howled in anger, sang out in a shrill fury.
At times over the next half hour, which seemed to be an eternity, the wood smoke grew stronger for a few moments, then disappeared altogether—only to return on the back of the wind just when Bass became convinced he had wandered off the path, or had passed the fire by. All through those next anxious minutes his mind tugged at it the way the current of the powerful Platte had tugged at his two horses, eventually claiming one—moving blind into the whiteout.
Suddenly he realized they had stepped off the shallow riverbank, their horses lunging into the Yellowstone. Icy water surged against their legs, washing against their bellies and ribs, swirling around his own left leg, spray and drops freezing instantly as the animals snorted in fear, whinnied in fear—plunging headlong for the north bank without a shred of hesitation. Only blind terror.
Waits cried out, a shrill yelp she stifled as her pony sidestepped there in the middle of the river where it found a deep pocket and swam back out, continuing to battle the current from the west and that blizzard born out of the north.
Stronger and stronger still the odor grew, then disappeared as the blizzard twisted this way and that—
Just as his horse’s front legs floundered and he sensed it was going down, Bass heaved back on Magpie with that left arm as she started to slip away from him, onto the animal’s withers. But with the next step the horse rocked back and shuddered, its front legs clawing—seizing ground, lunging onto the north bank with the last of its strength!
Out of the ghostly curtain emerged the dark shadow of the low, hulking block of neatly stacked timbers. He was almost upon the wall when it appeared right before them.
A few more steps and he stopped. Reached out and touched the chinked timbers with his crusted mitten.
“Halloo!” he croaked, barely audible as his cracked lips split even more painfully.
There against the wall, for the moment, they were out of the worst of the wind. He cried again, louder now, “Hal-halloo!”
It had to be Tullock’s post.
Bass reached over and tugged on the other pony’s rope now, getting their horses started again there in the lee of the log wall.
Fort Van Buren. Mouth of the Tongue. North bank of the Yellowstone.
“Halloo! Tullock!”
They reached the end of the wall, where the dark shadow of the timbers disappeared in the blizzard as the wind screeched itself around the low log structure.
“Tullock!” and the wind carried his cry away again—
“Who? Who goes there?”
Titus swallowed, ready to cry as he glanced over at his wife, squeezed his daughter tighter.
“B-bass!” he whimpered into the might of the storm. “Titus Bass!”
“Titus Bass?” the disembodied voice came to him around the corner of those timbers.
The ghost figure suddenly took shape. “I ain’t see’d your hide for longer’n I can count!”
“Tullock?”
“No!” and the tall, rail-thin figure stepped right around the corner of the post, stopping at Scratch’s knee to peer up at the frozen man from the hood of his capote. “It’s Levi, Scratch! Levi Gamble!”
The two tiny rooms that made up Fort Van Buren were gloomy with the blizzard’s blotting out the sun. Little light but for the four smoky oil lamps, a pair of flickering candle lanterns, along with that stone fireplace where two Indian women and a half-dozen children sat basking in the warmth.
Gamble shooed them back, clucking in Assiniboine, clearing a path through them as he ushered Waits-by- the-Water from the creaky door and had her settle right in the middle of the hearth where she dragged the crusted buffalo robe from her shoulders as the ice adhering to it began to sweat and dribble to the hardpacked floor. She bent her head, kissing the boy’s face, wiping her tears from his cheeks.
“I’ll see to this’un, Titus Bass,” Samuel Tullock offered with a kindly growl, kneeling and putting his arms out to accept the young girl as she emerged stiff and frightened from the buffalo robe and elk-hide coat Scratch had clutched around them both.
“I … I thankee,” Bass whispered, his throat clogged with appreciation—to Gamble, to Tullock. To God. “I truly do.”
Then he turned back to the door with Levi.
Outside the two of them stumbled after the animals already drifting before the wind that hurtled the men around like wood chips on a mountain stream. Lunging after the mule’s lead rope, Scratch managed to yank Samantha back toward the cabin.
The other ponies reluctantly turned when she did, following her as they would a bell-mare, while Gamble hollered and slapped and cajoled them from the rear as they busted through the snowdrifts already accumulating waist high at the corner of the fort. It was there the wind whipped and eddied. There along the south wall they tied the ropes off to iron swivel rings pounded waist high into the unpeeled logs.
For a long moment Bass stood there, shading his eyes from the wind and frozen snow with a mittened hand, staring at the ice caked on their legs, around their bellies. Howling snow and crossing that damned river—
“Ain’t nothing more you can do now!” Levi yelled above the deafening wail of the wind as it careened around the corner of the wall with a constant white slash.
For a moment Bass stood there, looking at all of them, the way the ice crusted their eyes, forelocks, and manes, how wind-scoured ridges of it lay gathered against the packs and even across the broad flanks all the way down to the tail roots.
Then he said, “If they’re meant to make it—they’ll be here when the storm’s passed.”
“C’mon,” Gamble urged. “Get on inside with your family.”
Some of the drifts were already tall enough that the deep snow billowed out the long tails of his coat, his legs busting through until he stood crotch-deep in the shocking cold, snow seeping down inside his breechclout and leggings. They had to kick with their toes, dig with their heels, at the thick, icy crust forming at the foot of the doorway. Eventually the two of them together were able to pry the door back toward them far enough to allow them to slip through sideways, then drag it closed against the square-hewn jamb.
Both Gamble and Bass sank to the floor, gasping, pummeled by the wind, worn down with the subzero cold, suddenly back inside where a man could hear his own heartbeat again, could hear the crackle of burning wood in that fireplace. Where a man felt relief at finding himself still alive.
Scratch’s face started to hurt as his breathing began to slow. He dragged off the coyote cap and that long strip of blanket he had tied around his head and over his ears, working at the frozen, crusted knot under his chin. Across the room at the fire, Waits-by-the-Water nursed little Flea in the flickering glow of that fireplace as she talked in low tones with the women. A young half-breed girl sat with Magpie, a pair of dolls between them.
Titus gazed into his wife’s face—her eyes saying that her faith in him had not been misplaced. As he worried the big antler buttons from their holes and pulled the flaps of his coat aside, his daughter looked over, stood, and started his way.
“Popo,” she said as clear as she ever had, coming into his arms.
As Magpie laid her cheek against her father’s chest, Titus sighed. “That’s a second time you’ve took my family in from a winter storm, Levi. How’s a man s’pose to repay you for kindness like that?”
“I’ll figger something out,” he gasped with a weary smile.
“We damn near thought you was the wind,” the trader said as he came over to the two of them with a long- necked clay bottle in hand. “Till Levi claimed it weren’t the wind calling my name out there.”
Bass gazed at Gamble. “I’d found the fort a’ready, by damn, Levi—no sense you coming out in that storm to
