nary a one of them displaying his special medicine, Scratch doubted they could be a war party. A bunch of bucks out for scalps and plunder didn’t drag along some pack animals. He figured that after they had wrapped up their raiding and were hightailing it on out of Crow country, then they planned to pack their stolen goods atop those extra horses.
But this bunch was loping east—toward the farthest reaches of Absaroka. If he didn’t know better, he might figure they were riding for the Tongue.
Letting them pass well out of sight before he emerged from hiding to hurry back for his family, Bass brooded how odd it was if the Blackfoot might actually be making for Tullock’s post. They had their own fort well up on the Missouri. Then again, these might well be some Blackfoot what belonged to a band who hadn’t gone in to trade with Culbertson at Fort McKenzie last summer when the pox’s prairie fire was igniting. This bunch might be from a village that later brushed up against some of those who got themselves infected from Culbertson’s men and the company’s goods.
If these horsemen had witnessed how the white man’s scourge devastated their brothers, it was possible they had sworn off packing their furs to Fort McKenzie some six miles upriver from the mouth of the Marias where old Fort Piegan stood abandoned and decaying, deciding instead to haul their robes and plews south and east to trade for powder and lead, guns and blankets at the Crows’ trading post.
Damn, if the pox hadn’t pulled the pegs right out from under the whole teetering balance of things here in the north country.
Power might well be in the process of shifting already. As the scourge ate its way through the Blackfoot, it would kill off a sizable number of their warrior bands—Blood, Piegan, Gros Ventre. Never again would they be as mighty as they had been from that day Meriwether Lewis’s party of explorers chanced to bump into them on the expedition’s homeward trek to St. Louis. With every year since that unfortunate tragedy in 1806, the tribe had grown more than intractable.
The Blackfoot had gone after Americans with a vengeance.
With fewer and fewer warriors, as well as fewer women to seed future generations of fighting men, this once-most-powerful confederation in the Northern Rockies could do nothing but watch their mighty strength slip through their fingers like overdry river-bottom sand. Without their overwhelming numbers, the Blackfoot would be hard-pressed to maintain the pressure on those American brigades daring to nibble hungrily around the edges of that once-forbidden beaver country where a man most certainly was gambling with his life.
All the more white men would come to shove back the Blackfoot frontier, season after season, assault after assault.
Those superstitious Blackfoot still alive after the pox had run its course would naturally believe that Fort McKenzie was the seat of the disease and their devastation. So they would seek out other traders, to the north among the English, and to the south among the hated Americans. Especially if that post lay in a region abandoned by the Crow who had been terrified enough to stay as far away as possible from Fort Van Buren.
If the Crow had heard of the disease and were avoiding Tullock at all costs, then they wouldn’t be trading to the benefit of the greedy company, nor trading for the powder and ball they themselves needed to hold back any Blackfoot encroachment upon Absaroka. Their superstition or their ignorance would keep them away from the mouth of the Tongue.
Could he blame the Crow for their fear? Not with the pox raging upriver and across the prairies as the Blackfoot carried it right into the heart of the Rockies.
Titus didn’t know how the devastation was transmitted. Never had understood such matters. Did the Blackfoot have to touch the Crow to pass along the infection? Or … could it be something as simple as the wind? Was this terror no more than a matter of the air in the Blackfoot country drifting over the hills and down the river valleys to reach Absaroka? Like a windwhipped grassfire, this scourge might well race from village to village on the air they would breathe, seeping stealthily from lodge to lodge. The infected would believe if they ran fast enough, if they fled far enough, they would stay ahead of what death loomed on the backtrail.
Then one night as Scratch banked their fire and slipped beneath the robes beside Waits, the cold of it suddenly struck him: if the Crow were as afraid of Tullock as they were of the company traders at Fort Union, how in heaven were the Crow going to react to him … one of the race who had brought this terrible epidemic to the mountains?
How could they believe that he wasn’t carrying the disease? Would they even trust in Waits-by-the-Water?
Or because they so desperately feared the pox brought by the Americans, would the Crow warriors do everything in their power to prevent him from reaching their village?
Instead of risking that gamble, would the Crow decide they must kill him?
Scratch had begun to wonder if they ever would find Yellow Belly’s people.
For the better part of a month they had been scouring the river valley, west all the way to the Big Bend of the Yellowstone then back to Clark’s Fork, with no sign of either village. Not a clue on the River Crow; no Mountain band either. For the past two weeks he had begun to despair of finding them at all, much less finding the village in time to warn them of the danger from the north.
But Bass swallowed it all down, refusing to let her know of his doubts. On and on they plodded from first light to last, halting only when it grew so dark he dared not stumble on through the broken, icy country. At the mouth of every tiny creek they passed, he brooded on what he should be doing instead of this fool’s errand Tullock and Gamble had talked him into accepting.
This was clearly a time when a man should be stalking the flat-tails. Plain enough the animals would have grown a thick coat, as brutal as this winter had become. Why didn’t he just admit he had failed and go off to do what he had done for the last few winters—spend a handful of days away from the lodge to trap on his lonesome, then return with the pelts for her to scrape and stretch, play with the youngsters, couple with her each night until he felt that itch to leave again?
But every time he tried talking logically, rationally, to himself about it, reciting the litany of reasons why he should put this futile search aside and get on with the white man’s business of trapping beaver … Titus felt that sharp pang of remorse in his belly—the way something distasteful soured his meat bag. He knew he would never be able to look his wife in the eye if he gave up.
Should they not find the village until spring, so be it. More important than his beaver was this matter of his duty to Waits-by-the-Water’s people.
For three more days they moved up Clark’s Fork, traveling some seventy miles south of the Yellowstone. Odd that they hadn’t run across any sign of hunters, much less sign of the village itself. That many people camped for the winter somewhere near the valley of the Yellowstone had to leave some evidence of their passing. So many hundreds upon hundreds of bellies to feed, thousands upon thousands of ponies needing pasture. So far, not a sign along the Yellowstone, nothing from the Tongue to the Great Bend and back again to Clark’s Fork.
They had come to the very foot of the mountains. Instead of pushing on to the south into the narrowing valley, Scratch turned east. Climbing with the rising ground on the sunrise side of the fork, they dropped into a high rolling country. To the west lay the Stinking Water and what the trappers called Colter’s Hell, a route that would lead a man into the region the Crow revered as the Land of Spirit Smokes. To the east lay the valley of the Bighorn. Ahead to the south lay the Greybull basin.
“Have your people ever come this far south to winter?” he asked her that night after they had camped among some hot pools of sulfurous water.
“Twice, when I was much younger,” Waits said as she stood from pulling off the last moccasin.
She grabbed the bottom of her hide dress and raised it over her head. When she had shimmied out of her blanket leggings, Waits tested the water’s temperature, sticking her toe into the pool where he sat submerged to his armpits. Around them a gauzy steam wisped into cold midwinter air.
He glanced at their children sleeping a few yards back from the edge of the pool. “Come here.”
As she glided through the smoky water, he reached out and pulled her to him. “Why would your village ever come so far south?”
“If the winter was terribly cold,” she explained as she settled across the tops of his thighs. “They will always go where there is meat, where the winds won’t blow so long and hard. Where spring might return a little sooner.”
He bent, kissed the tops of her breasts as they shimmered at the surface of the water. His flesh stirred.
