some sense of its unreality. Then suddenly it struck him at the pit of his belly where that cold stone still lay. “What about the Crow?”
“So far as we know,” the trader said as he leaned back against a bundle of robes, “the pox ain’t come no farther up the Yellowstone.”
“F-far as you know?”
Both of them nodded. “None of the Crow been in to trade with me since late summer—’bout the time I heard first rumors of it up at Fort Union. I was on my way north to find out why the boat didn’t come down with my year’s goods.”
“No Crow?” Scratch echoed, hopeful. “Maybeso they heard and they’re staying away.”
“Can’t count on that, Titus. Someone’s gotta tell ’em,” Levi advised. “That’s what me and Sam’l been trying to sort through last few days. Where to find ’em—how to tell ’em to stay away.”
“And someone’s gotta tell ’em to stay away from the Blackfoot,” Scratch declared solemnly. “Can’t go make war on them what’s got the pox.”
He watched both Tullock and Gamble nod as they glanced at one another.
Levi turned back to gaze at Bass. “We figger you’re the one, Titus.”
“The one for what?”
Gamble sighed. “Go tell the Crow the white man’s brought sure death to the mountains.”
23
Those ghastly, unspeakable images Levi had burned into his mind continued to haunt Bass, day and night.
Scratch even believed he could somehow smell the stench of those dying people, wriggling maggots starting to nibble away at their decaying bodies even before they had taken their last breath.
Once those who had been inoculated with Jacob Halsey’s illness began to sicken with the maddening fever and die, the fort workers were ordered to remove their families at the first sign of the disease. The half-burned Fort William barely standing a hundred-some yards east of the Fort Union stockade became their sick haven. This post where the Deschamps clan once reigned soon became a den of death.
Most days, Levi had explained, the winds in that country came from the west, occasionally out of the north. But on those rare days when the wind did not blow at all—or worse yet, the upslope breeze drifted out of the east —the stench of putrefying flesh of those too ill to do anything but lie in their own human excrement mingled with the unbearable reek of decaying bodies.
This matter of odor, even stench, was something of such immediate vividness to one who lived among these mountains. Outdoors, here beneath this restless sky, in a land where the air always moved, for a man to describe to another the overwhelming power of that decay made it so vivid that Titus believed he truly could smell death’s most gruesome, repulsive retribution in his own nostrils.
From the ramparts of Fort Union the company employees watched many of their loved ones and friends, watched those friendly Assiniboine stricken with the unbearable fevers, all go stumbling down the barren slope to the boat landing at the Missouri where they plunged themselves into the cold waters, their dulled minds seeking somehow to snuff out the unquenchable fire. Most who plunged into the river simply never returned to the bank. Their constitutions weakened, sapped by the pox’s destructive power, then shocked by the brutal cold of the powerful and capricious spring-fed currents, one after another they vainly flailed at the river as they were swept away to a watery end.
And that moaning Levi described—the uncanny wails drifting night and day from the blackened walls of Fort William, from those hide lodges where death’s angel touched the Assiniboine one after another—and from the dusty banks of the river where the few went to mourn the many who had crawled to the Missouri to die.
Through the hours of that winter blizzard, Gamble described the pitiful whimpering of the dying children, the groans of the women no longer able to care for their little ones. How the horror of it floated on that dry summer wind both day and night without ceasing.
“Like a haunting,” Levi quietly explained.
An undeniable wraith that would not depart, could not be driven away. Unceasing until its ravenous appetite had consumed all and there were none left to cry out for mercy.
“What become of ’em?” Titus had asked as winter’s fury howled outside those log walls of Fort Van Buren. “Y-your family.”
“After more’n a day of quiet—not a sound from anyone or anything—I went to the stockade. Looked in through the window at all that was left of them what went there to die,” Gamble whispered. “There was nothing moving but for the scratch of the mice at the food we’d brung to leave at the walls for the sick’uns.”
“They … your wife and chirrun … was all took?”
“Aye, Titus. Some of us, we soaked our kerchiefs in coal oil and tied ’em around our noses, done our best to remember to breathe through our mouths. But still that stink … that stink.”
“You done what you had to do to bury your own family,” Scratch said barely above a whisper.
But Gamble shook his head. “No. Rolled my little’uns onto them poxy blankets. Found ever’ one of ’em being et up with maggots awready. Their skin oozy and bleeding from the sores, the maggots swarming and wriggling in every hole on their flesh. Nothing else to do but drag ’em all out to the prairie where the village stood, and we built us a big fire. Throwed downed trees and logs, lodgepoles and hides too on that fire till the flames climbed clear to the sky and the smoke reached even higher.”
Then for a long moment it seemed the very breath had gone out of Levi’s body, and he could not speak as he was reliving the ghastly horror of it.
Titus swallowed. “A fire?”
Staring at a spot between his moccasins on the earthen floor, the aging frontiersman explained, “We throwed the dead on the fire. Prayed we’d burn the pox till there was nothing for the pox to live on no more.” Levi shuddered. “The way it ate on humankind—just the way we humans eat the flesh of the poor dumb creatures we kill.”
Scratch found himself unable to escape Gamble’s gruesome, heartfelt descriptions, haunted every mile he took his family west from the mouth of the Tongue. Those grisly images continued to prey upon his mind like frightening specters from that world beyond his own. Terrifying images all too real: the stench of filth and rotting corpses, the horror of those hideous and oozing pustules writhing with maggots, and finally the purifying heat of that raging bonfire as the sanctifying flames consumed loved ones.
Each day Titus found he repeatedly turned in the saddle to assure himself Waits-by-the-Water was still behind him, to confirm that she held little Flea in her arms or that his cradleboard swung from the tall pommel of her prairie-chicken saddle. Every night when they made camp and Waits busied herself at the fire, Titus clutched those children more firmly against him; later he wrapped himself more securely around his wife as they slept in their robes.
To lose them the way Levi lost his woman, their children … was a prospect far more terrifying than the possibility of losing his own life. Better was it that he die himself than to face a future lonely, stark, and bleak without the three of them.
It was to be a winter when the way of the mountains was turned on its head.
Fort Van Buren had been no more than a day behind them when Scratch hustled their ponies into a copse of cottonwood and brush on the south bank of the Yellowstone. No more than a quarter mile ahead he spotted some horsemen picking their way along the bottom ground at the foot of the rimrocks along the north side of the river. After leaving the others in hiding, Bass ventured out on foot to have himself a look before he made himself known. If the bunch was Crow, he could ask them where he would find Yellow Belly’s village.
But turned out they were Blackfoot.
Studying them closely with his small, leather-covered brass looking glass, Titus noted those greased forelocks standing stiffly, provocatively erect as a challenge to any would-be enemy, daring an opponent to attempt removing the scalp. Behind more than two dozen riders came at least that many riderless horses, the whole cavvyyard moving east at an easy pace. Close as he could tell, none of them were wearing paint. Moseying the way they were,
