attacked us when we were on our way to the Vermillion Creek post?”*
Waits nodded, and her eyes flicked back to their children. “I agree. We are safer in the mountains.”
“Out there on the plains, where we traveled north from Taos more than ten summers ago, many tribes follow the migrations of the buffalo, north and south, moving along the base of the mountains. Not only Arapaho—but I fear the Sioux and Cheyenne have come to join them too. Where the buffalo graze at this time of the year, so too are the hunters who are working hard to kill enough meat to get their people through the winter.”
With a sigh, Waits nodded. “It is good I married a man so cautious!”
Camped in the heart of North Park six days later, for the first time Bass told her of Fawn, the Ute widow who took him in his first winter in the mountains.†
“I never knew you were partial to the Ute women,” she said, not raising her eyes from the child’s moccasin she was repairing.
“She was fair to me, not asking me to stay when it came time to go,” Bass explained. “For that I am thankful. If she hadn’t let me go the next spring … I never would have made it to Absaroka, where my eyes first saw you.”
“And when your eyes finally did see me?”
He snorted with laughter, “Then I was no good for any other woman! I had to have you and no other!”
High upon the southern slopes of that high mountain valley the mountain man called Park Kyack or Buffalo Park, he stopped them near the middle of the following day to give their horses a breather. From there he pointed out where the Ute village had stood.
“Flea, Magpie—I want you both to hold up all your fingers for me,” he instructed.
They glanced at one another, then looked in wonder at their mother a moment before they turned back to their father and did as he had asked.
“There. I want the two of you and your mother to look at all those fingers on your four hands,” he said. “Two-times-ten of your fingers. One finger for each year it has been since I first came to the mountains. Two- times-ten winters now since my first winter here, spent among the Ute.”
Their eyes looked over the twenty brown fingers they held up, spread apart, then gazed down at that grassy park below them. An elk bugled at that moment. Its singular sound always made the hair stand on the back of his neck.
“Two-times-ten,” Waits repeated the number. “That is a long time for a man to take risks with his life.”
“I don’t have to take chances anymore,” he said. “Now that I have everything I ever wanted, I’ve learned I should never take risks again.”
Crossing the divide they dropped into Middle Park, another, but smaller, mountain valley. All around them now the elk were bugling, the cows herding up for the rut and the bulls beginning to spar as the grasses dried a little faster now and the morning breeze carried a stiff chill with the sun’s rising.
As they climbed across the high saddle that carried them from the south end of Middle Park, the sky lowered with a harsh, metallic urgency. They plodded through a swirling storm the rest of that day, camped, then awoke to the same storm. On through that day they pushed, then most of a third before he could finally start them down into the northern reaches of that southernmost of the mountain
“Does this ground look familiar?” he asked his wife when they halted and dismounted just past midmorning the following day.
She looked high on either side of them, studying the ever-rising tumble of snow-covered slopes that climbed into the belly of the gray clouds. “I have been here before?”
“Not this spot,”* he replied. “But you’ve been in this valley.”
She peered down the narrow vale running north to south. Then she looked at him again. “This is where you killed the men who attacked Looks Far Woman.”† Waits-by-the-Water turned and gazed into the valley once more, and shuddered with the memory. “And this is where all four of us had to slay the others who came after us when you killed the first warriors.”
“That was a long, long time ago,” he said, watching her eyes glance at Magpie. “Yes, when those events took place, you already carried our daughter in your belly.”
She turned in her prairie saddle to look at him, rubbing a mitten across the hot tears that had spilled down her cheeks. “I don’t want to spend a lot of time in this place, Ti-tuzz. The memories are bad. Please—take us through as much of this valley as you can before it grows too dark to ride.”
Till the end of that shrinking day, and on through the next, Scratch pushed the children and their animals alike—from that first gray stain of predawn until the last moments before the arrival of slap-dark, putting behind them every mile they could—sensing his wife’s growing anxiety to be gone from this place of an undeniable horror.
Halting at midday only to water the animals and climb down from the saddle to stomp circulation back into their legs, Bass’s family doggedly pressed on as the winds blew stronger and the snows fell deeper upon those slopes above them. The farther south they marched, the more an old nostalgia rose in him like the buttercream that floated to the surface of the steamy milk he had just coaxed from his father’s cows back in Rabbit Hash. With each new day, he felt as if he knew how it was to be a mule with the scent of a home stall strong in its nostrils.
As the days continued to shorten, he found himself growing all the more restless and increasingly impatient at their night fires, where he began to talk more and more of the Taos valley, more and more of the spicy food and heady liquor and that strong native tobacco—not to mention how he described the raucous, risky recollections of his adventures in that dangerous Mexican village. He tucked the blankets and robes over their three children, who slept together to hold the dropping temperatures at bay, then crawled in beside his wife. Waits snuggled tightly against him.
“I have grown a little afraid of something, husband,” she whispered.
He combed her hair between his fingertips and soothed, “That was more than ten long winters ago. You don’t need to fear the Arapaho now.”
“It isn’t them I am afraid of,” she explained, wagging her head against his chest. “Ever since that day when we looked at all the tracks made in the grass by the white man’s little houses, I started to wonder about something.”
“If not the Arapaho, what makes you frightened?”
“I saw how you looked at those white-man tracks going off to the far horizon in both directions. Ever since, I’ve been scared that you no longer feel you belong in Absaroka.”
He saw how much worry was etched on her face. “Why would you think that?”
“The spring when Magpie was born, and we were going to leave Ta-house—you told me it was time for us to return north to the mountains because they knew our names. To return home to the land of my people.”
“Yes, the mountains are our home—”
“But, Ti-tuzz,” she interrupted, “I fear going to Ta-house means your heart has changed.”
“Changed?”
“I think you will want to make Ta-house our home now,” she confessed. “Because you have grown tired of Absaroka in the last few winters.”
He took a few minutes to consider his answer, then said, “If you think back to that time we spent in Taos ten years ago, I think you will remember one thing is clear: That land ain’t for me. In the same way, I could no more go back to Saint Louis with all the crush of folks and their judging eyes. No, I wouldn’t dare sink down roots in Saint Louis, or in Taos, neither. Too many folks for my liking. Besides, the life people in those places hold dear is a life that turns my heart hard and cold.”
“You are sure? You don’t want us to live in this Ta-house?”
He chuckled, looking down at her eyes. “No. It’s a fine place to visit every ten years or so, but it isn’t for the likes of me, woman.”
“But—if your heart isn’t at home in Ta-house, are you sure it’s at home in Absaroka?”
“The only thing I am certain of anymore is that my home is with you and the children,” he admitted, clutching her tightly against him. “Where you are, that is my home.”
Her voice quivered when she asked, “Do you mean to say that your home is not in Absaroka?”
“No,” he admitted. “I don’t really know for sure where my home is anymore. This country is changing, and the old ways have been yanked out from under me. I fear I’m not a man who can easily change. All that I once believed
