“How far south would they go?”
“I can remember wintering one time in the shadow of the mountains.”
He pointed off to the south. “Those mountains still far away?”
“Yes,” she answered, but her voice had lowered an octave with that huskiness born of hunger as she took his hardening flesh into her hand, kneading it.
“Then we should go until the River of the Winds turns west at the foot of the mountains?”
“At least that far.”
He sighed with the delicious pleasure she was bringing him as she rubbed his flesh against herself, as she began to squirm a little in anticipation of him. “I am sure this is the season we spent together in Taos, the happy celebration before I left.”
“Ta-house,” Waits repeated the word in English. Then in Crow she said, “I remember the sweet foods Rosa made for us, the smells from her warm cooking, the flavors she put in her coffee so strong, sweet, and milky.”
“You are milky too,” he said as he gently raised one of her breasts, then sucked at the nipple while she groaned, suckled gently until he tasted the warm, sweet, sticky milk.
She reminded him, “Th-that is your son’s milk.”
“But this is his father’s breast.”
“So whose is this?” she asked, squeezing his manhood firmly as she rose a little, positioned his hardened flesh, then settled down on him with an agonizingly delicious slowness.
He rocked his hips upward, squirming to seat himself within her. “I think it is yours now.”
“Then we agree,” she said devilishly as she began to rock more insistently upon him. “It does belong to me.”
The following morning they pushed on south, marching upriver for the mountains that loomed ever larger to the southeast, a chain stretching across the entire horizon, their pinnacles and slopes blotted by an unbroken mantle of snow extending from hoary crests all the way down to the valley floor. At the mouth of the Popo Agie they turned north by northwest, following the Wind River along its foothills. After a snowfall two days later they crossed a large trail. Hunters. If it wasn’t the Crow, he figured it might well be the Snake.
They followed the tracks north for another day, then made camp after sundown, once it had grown too dark to follow those tracks left by more than a dozen horses. That night when he stepped away from the fire to look after the animals, Scratch stood among the ponies, rubbing Samantha’s withers. After a few minutes he became aware of the faint fragrance of wood smoke drifting in on the wind.
Turning this way, then that, Titus realized he wasn’t smelling his own fire. Instead, it had to be smoke wafting over the hilltop just beyond their campsite. His heart leaped.
Crunching across the surface of the frozen ground, he loped through the trees toward the crest where the black of the night sky collided with the pale blue of the icy, moonlit snow. By the time he reached the top, Scratch was out of breath, huffing as much from sheer anticipation as he was with the exertion. At first it did not strike him what he was seeing, those tiny specks of light appearing as so many points of starshine reflected off the endless smear of snow in the far valley.
Slowly he realized they had to be campfires. More than a hundred of them. A few glittered brightly, but most had a translucent, opaque quality to them.
“Lodges,” he whispered as excitement gushed up within him.
Then turned on his heel and hurried downhill through the animals for their campfire.
“Woman!” Scratch cried lustily as he came bounding up. “Woman—I see a village below!”
“Ssshhh,” she warned, pointing to where the children lay sleeping, then asked, “Are there many lodges?”
He gulped for air, swallowed, and said, “It must be Yellow Belly’s camp. There are hundreds of lights—many, many fires and lodges.”
“I think I will have trouble sleeping tonight,” she said, leaping to her feet and throwing her arms around him.
“It makes my heart glad to see how happy this makes you,” he declared, squeezing her tightly. “Tomorrow you will see your mother, you will see Strikes-in-Camp and his family too.”
Burying her face against the crook of his neck, Waits-by-the-Water confided softly, “I have been so afraid that they were no more, husband. I feared they had been swept away like the others who have been touched by the white man’s death.”
“But they haven’t disappeared,” he consoled her.
“Until now, a big hole in my heart feared that very thing,” she admitted. “I did not want to trust we could find them. As the days became many, I grew more afraid we would find empty lodges, skeletons of bone wrapped in tattered clothing, every one of my people eaten by this terrible sickness.”
“We found them alive. They are safe,” he reassured her, his own tangible relief lifting a great weight from his shoulders. “Tomorrow we will rejoin your mother, your brother, and his family. And tomorrow night we can laugh at your fears as we gather around their fire, all of us, and throw these fears of yours into the flames.”
“Tomorrow,” she echoed the word in a whisper. “I was so afraid tomorrow would never come.”
That dawn came cold and gray, a hulking bank of clouds the color of a ripe bruise hovering halfway down the mountain slopes. By the time Flea had nursed and Magpie finished chewing some cold meat from last night’s supper with her father, Bass had the animals packed for what should be a short ride.
He had been anticipating this morning ever since the day they put Fort Van Buren behind them. Afraid he would only deepen what he could see was his wife’s own growing anxiety, Scratch kept his fears to himself. Day by day he had become a bit more morose—swallowing deep the slightest image his mind conjured of their searching endlessly, eventually to stumble across a camp of Crow lodges, entering the circle to discover that it was now home only to magpies and robber jays, coyotes and wolves, as the flocks and packs of predators worked over the bodies of three thousand dead.
In his own way Scratch had been praying every day that when they finally found Yellow Belly’s camp, they would not find a village of ghosts. Afraid that after saving them from the blizzard, God would not now succor his newest prayer.
With the way the wind was quickly quartering around to blow out of the northwest, the smell of wood smoke grew strong once again. Far behind them now stood that ridge crest where he had peered into this valley as the unnumbered fires twinkled in the clear, subfreezing night air. Ahead, in that bottom ground where a creek flowed out of the tall, cloud-covered mountains to pour itself into Wind River, stood the camp. Hundreds upon hundreds of smoky spires rose from the lodges, each column quickly absorbed by the belly of those low-hanging clouds momentarily hued with a reddish-orange tint as the sun foretold its emergence from the east.
“Camp guards,” she announced, pointing to their right.
He turned in the saddle, finding the eight horsemen bursting from the timber, loping their way.
More hooves clattered to their left as another half dozen broke into the open. These, like the first, carried shields at their left elbows, war clubs or bows in their right hands, while a few held aloft long lances festooned with scalps and brightly colored cloth streamers made all the more brilliant in these moments of the sun’s brief journey between earth and cloud bank.
At first he did not recognize any of the young men coming their way, afraid this was not a Crow village. But as the riders approached, he recognized the hairstyles, the special markings on a shield here or there. And then he heard a camp guard yelling at them in his wife’s tongue.
These were Crow!
But instead of welcoming, the voices shouted in warning, two of them now—both voices strident and … afraid.
“What are they telling us?” he asked of her, beginning to pull back on the pony’s reins uneasily.
“We must stop,” she said in dismay, her eyes as wide as Mexican conchos when she looked to him for explanation.
Of a sudden Titus was afraid he knew the answer. Fourteen warriors fanned out in a broad front as they came to a halt fifty yards from them.
“Popo?”
“Ssshhh,” he rasped at Magpie.
He felt the girl pull herself against his back more tightly as she tilted her face up so she could whisper to
