snowfall, Bass trudged over to the youngster whose eyes never once left the trapper as he went and came. The black orbs were growing with wonder at what the old man was up to—if not downright consternation—by the time Titus stopped by the corpse, grabbed an edge of the blanket, and unfurled it in the frosty air.
When he had it draped over the body, completely covering the warrior from his greased and feathered topknot to the soles of his buffalo-hide winter moccasins, Bass straightened once more and dusted snow from the knee of his legging.
“I know this’un means something to you,” he said as the youngster’s eyes eventually climbed to stare into his. “Far as I know, for most of your people—no matter what tribe you be—red’s the color for war. No better honor I can give this nigger what tried to kill me than to leave him on his back, facing the sky. And cover ’im with red—head to toe—the color of a warrior’s paint.”
23
He was relieved when the youngster ate something that next sunrise as the dawn swelled around them.
Throughout the first day, the boy had refused to eat, even turning his head away when Bass offered him a drink of water from a tin cup from time to time while they waited out the snowstorm.
“You get hungry ’nough, thirsty too—I wager you’ll let me know.”
Bass knelt now, offering him some hot coffee, but the youngster refused it, preferring melted snow in another cup. Then the boy’s black eyes landed on the meat Scratch had roasting over the flames as the sky grayed. Carefully carving a long, thin slice from the venison ham that sizzled and popped as it cooked, Titus carried it over to the boy.
Eagerly tilting his chin up, the Blackfoot accepted the offered meat, chewing ravenously as the white man let the long sliver of meat descend between the youth’s lips.
“Bet you want more of that.”
The youngster’s tongue flicked across his greasy mouth while his eyes danced back to that venison haunch broiling over the fire. The boy damn well ate more than half of the whole leg that morning!
With the sun’s arrival at the edge of the earth, it was time to bring in the horses one by one. Across their backs he laid the thick wool saddle pads he had traded off Goddamn Murray, then cinched down each of the crude, wooden sawbucks before securing two heavy loads to the saddles, one on each side of the horse. Over the loads he diamond-hitched a drape of oiled sheeting that would protect his trade goods from even the most violent, wind- driven, horizontal rain.
But, he sighed after finishing the knots on the last of the dozen horses, there was little chance for any calamity like frozen rain this day. The sun was emerging bold and brassy in a cloudless blue sky. As far as the eye could see, the whole world was bathed in white, cleansed anew. Damn near as virginal as this land was the day after God made all these fine, fine sculpturings for the few men what lived in such sacred places as these.
Already the glare was growing intense. Here in the shadows of these big cottonwoods the sunlight wasn’t near so bad. But out there where he’d be spending the day in the saddle—that intense reflection off the snow would damn well blind him by afternoon. Winter sunlight was even more merciless than summer sun this far north.
His lips were already burnt, cracked and sore as they were. Titus had been breathing hard with the sort of exertion a younger man would’ve taken in stride. But, Titus Bass was no longer a young man. He was having to admit how his body was tiring of the constant struggle just to do what he had taken for granted a decade ago— much less what he was able to do those seventeen winters ago when he first came to these High Stonies. He couldn’t help the hard breathing, or having to take things a bit slower, or being forced to pace himself at every major task that came his way … but he could do something about the searing heat of his oozy lips.
Raising the flap on his shooting pouch, Scratch’s bare fingers located and pulled out the flat tin made of tarnished German silver. Thumbing in the spring-loaded catch, he flipped back the hinged top before wiping two fingertips across the hard, milky grease he had rendered from bear fat early last spring before setting off for the Wind Rivers: a three-year-old black bear he had killed down in the breaks of the Bighorn as a change of diet for him and his family.
As he slowly worked the grease into his inflamed lips, Titus thought on how human that bear’s carcass had looked hanging there from a sturdy tree branch after he had skinned it. Damn near spooky. For days after he had ruminated on nearly every story the Yuta or Snake or Crow had to tell about their brother, the bear. Human or not, to have a look at one trussed up and skinned out sure could give even the most skeptical of men the willies.
Then he sank to one knee beside the fire pit where the last of the branches had burnt themselves down to glowing, flameless embers. After putting a small dollop of the bear grease into the palm of his left hand, Scratch scooped up some of the blackest char he could find at the side of the pit and crumbled a little of it onto the greasy palm. Pitching the rest of the blackened wood back into the pit, Titus used a single fingertip to mix charcoal and animal fat together until he had a thick, black paste.
Rising, he turned to face the youngster while smearing a gob of paste across the wrinkled, sagging skin beneath the one weathered, but good, eye. It would go a long way in preventing most of the glare he would suffer, since more than eighty-five percent of the sun’s intensity was reflected off that new, pristine snow they would be crossing in the day’s search.
They.
He wasn’t completely sure why, but sometime around twilight the night before, Bass had decided it would be
A solution the youngster might come to live by.
Kneeling an arm’s length from the youngster now, Scratch swiped a greasy gob of the fire-black onto his fingertip, then reached out to smear it beneath the boy’s eye. With a menacing growl that reminded Scratch of a cornered dog, the Blackfoot jerked his head aside, his eyes filling with sudden fear.
“Why, you li’l son of a bitch,” Bass husked. “I’m doin’ this for your own good, dammit.”
Again he tried to get the fingertip near the boy’s eyes, but the Blackfoot snapped his head side to side. Titus scooted a little closer on his knee. With surprising swiftness he brought up his left hand, pressing the heel of his palm against the boy’s forehead, pinning the back of the youngster’s head against the tree with all his weight. Try as he might, the Blackfoot could only shriek and snap with his teeth at the hand that proceeded to paint the colored grease beneath both eyes—
Paint. Jehoshaphat! If that weren’t likely it!
He released his grip on the youngster’s brow and leaned back.
“Lookee here now,” and he pointed below his one good eye with that blackened fingertip. “This here’s what I’m doin’ to you. I ain’t painting you up for no mourning or grieving. Don’t you see, boy? This ain’t no war grieving I’m doing on you—so stop your damned caterwauling!”
A few more times he gestured with that black fingertip, pointing back and forth between his own eye and the youth’s eyes until the Blackfoot quit shrieking and the panic drained from the boy’s face. Scooting backward a couple of feet, Titus stabbed his bare hands into the snow, scooping up enough that he could use to wash his fingers and that palm. Again and again he rubbed the snow over the greasy, blackened skin until he had scrubbed off about all he could, then swiped his palms down the grease-blackened, bloodstained, stiffened fronts of his leggings.
Titus stood to gaze down at the red blanket. “What you figger me to do with your blood kin?”
When the youngster turned and stared at the shrouded corpse for a long time without returning Bass’s gaze, Titus asked, “You don’t ’spect me to drag him along with us, now do you? Don’t you get that notion in your head —’cause I’d just as soon leave you here with ’im as have to drag his cold carcass with us next few days till we find them Crow.
