“I am going with you,” the Crow argued. “There are Blackfoot to kill, scalps to lift—because I am going to die soon. I have vowed to take many of the enemy with me when I depart for the other side.”
“Then the boy must go with us.”
“You cannot take him,” he protested. “A young child does not belong when you are going on a war trail —”
“Neither of us are going back to the village,” Bass interrupted. “We are going after the Blackfoot. Flea will go with me.”
“Think of what you are doing. Let me go alone, and you can come along after you have taken him to the village. Bring the rest of the warriors Stiff Arm went to fetch.”
“Flea is going with me, and we are going now,” Bass turned, cradling the boy, searching the ground, kicking at the scraps of blanket and robe, hoping to find the remains of the cradleboard.
Strikes-in-Camp darted in front of the white man, stopping a dozen feet in front of him, throwing up his arms to get Titus to stop. “The child will catch the sickness. If not from me, your son will catch the sickness from the Blackfoot we are chasing.”
Looking down at his son’s face, Scratch said, “Maybe he will not die because he has some of my blood in him.”
The warrior asked, “Are you willing to risk that?”
For a long moment Bass stared down at the boy’s face. “It’s the best I can do, Strikes-in-Camp. If I go back to make him safe, then I won’t be able to help the other two.”
“Are you willing to risk the life of your son to get the others?”
“I think that is what my heart feels,” he admitted. “If Flea loses his mother, his sister too … then I don’t think he would want to go on living either.” Bass took a deep breath. “I know I will not want to go on if we cannot save the woman, the girl.”
“Then you have decided,” the warrior declared flatly, a look of determination written across his face. “A father, a husband, has made his choice for his family. As it should be.”
“Yes,” he said, looking up from the child’s face to gaze into the Crow’s eyes. “I will bring all my family back … or I will die with them.”
He tied the last knot in the rawhide strings that bound the scraps of blanket around the boy’s body. After swaddling Flea with some small pieces of the buffalo robe, Bass had encased the child in a large scrap of blanket, then wrapped loops of rawhide around and around the makeshift cradle. From those strips of rawhide, he hung two loops. Now he stood with the bundle in his arms and carried the infant over to his horse where he dropped the loops around the large round pommel on his Santa Fe saddle.
Only the child’s face remained uncovered. Scratch bent, kissed the boy on the cheek, then tugged the folds of blanket over the tiny copper face to protect it from the cold and the wind.
“My dog,” he said to the Crow, turning from the horse—remembering. “You see any sign of him?”
The warrior hunched over some bushes, his arms stuffed into the brush, pulling branches aside. “No blood. No body. The dog is not here … but this is.”
He watched Strikes-in-Camp pull a trade gun from the vegetation.
“Is this yours?” the Indian asked, holding it out between them.
Bass took the weapon, examined it, and said, “Yes. I left several weapons with her. They were loaded.”
“My sister must have thrown it here.”
“Why didn’t she use them?”
The warrior bent over another clump of brush, fishing with an arm. “I can only think that Waits-by-the-Water believed she could not shoot the firearms without endangering her children. So she threw them away as the warriors rode into your camp—so the Blackfoot wouldn’t have the weapons, and protecting the little ones from the enemy.”
Strikes-in-Camp straightened again, this time holding one of the big horse pistols.
“There’s bound to be more,” Bass said, laying the trade gun and pistol on a piece of the torn blanket. “Search—search it all. Maybe the war party didn’t steal any of the weapons before they ran away.”
Standing at some more bushes, the warrior asked, “Do you think we scared them away before they could search more carefully?”
“No,” and Bass wagged his head. “If they had someone watching, they would have seen there were only two of us. I don’t think we would have scared off so many. They would have waited for us.”
“Why did they go so quickly—before they found all the firearms, before they discovered the little boy?”
Scratch looked at Flea, wagging his head as he said, “Only thing I know is that finding my son and these weapons are a good sign the First Maker is ready to give me this one shot at getting my family back.”
26
He prayed it would stay cold, so cold it dared not snow.
Much more often here in the Northern Rockies than anywhere else in the central or southern mountains it grew too cold to snow. His prayer was far more than merely wishing against any snow that might fill in and hide the hoofprints left by the Blackfoot war party. Instead, Bass realized the deep temperatures would keep the tracks from melting during the day, then refreezing at night. What that sort of thing did to the top layer of snow could be cruel torture to their horses’ legs. Much better that it stayed so cold it didn’t snow.
After stuffing the trade gun and that English fusil under the rawhide whangs on Samantha’s packs, strapping the extra pistols across the mule’s withers, Titus and Strikes-in-Camp began their chase. Crossing the frozen river, the Blackfoot trail headed straight across the lowlands for the better part of that afternoon—a trail that put both the pursued and the pursuers right out in the open under a hard, gray sky.
There was no way for the two of them to hide right out in the open, the direction the trail took. If the Blackfoot had chanced to leave a scout to watch over their backtrail, he would have spotted the two men coming behind. Nowhere to hide. But if the bastards did leave someone behind to watch for any pursuers, Scratch figured the Blackfoot would just scoff at two lonely riders trailing after them. They wouldn’t feel enough of a threat to lay any ambush.
But that didn’t mean the two of them could relax. It just didn’t pay not being wary when the trail they were following eventually headed off to the northwest, striking for the foothills. By sundown it was plain to see that the Blackfoot were intending to drive up the heights, crossing the high country to reach the Yellowstone on the far side. From there they would push on with their prisoners and plunder until they reached their homeland. They had killed some Crow warriors. And they had stolen some traps from a white man. Worst of all, the thieves had torn Bass’s life apart. They had his wife and daughter.
That first night they found some tall willow and cedar growing at the mouth of a coulee they could use for a windbreak. Unsaddling the animals, both men tore sage from the frozen ground, shook off the icy snow, then used the brush to rub down the beasts, doing their best to dry the horses before their sweat froze with the terrible cold as night deepened and the temperatures plummeted. That done, they laid scraps of the torn blankets over their three animals, then settled back in a copse of gnarled, fragrant cedar to wait out the morning.
“Sit here,” Titus whispered to Strikes-in-Camp. “Bring your robe to share with us.”
“Th-the boy?”
Scratch looked down at Flea. Then said, “Come, we will share our warmth with him.”
Together they spread one robe across the ground in the middle of their cedar shelter, then sat with the bundled infant between them before pulling a large blanket and the bigger of the two robes over their heads to make a tiny tent. Even though some of the bitter cold still wicked up through the robe from the frozen snow, the two of them were able to keep themselves and the infant warm enough that they didn’t shudder much.
Whether from the cold, or from his hunger, Flea began to fuss later just as Titus felt himself dozing off.
In that growing warmth of their shelter, Bass blindly felt for the knots binding the infant in his blanket cocoon. One by one he untied them, then pulled the bundled child into his lap. From a pouch he had dragged into the shelter with him, Scratch pulled some dried meat he had taken on his ride to the Crow village. The first small piece he broke off and held in his fingers while his other hand felt around to locate Flea’s tiny paw in the dark. Once he found
