himself. With the boy’s rope in one hand, Titus took the horse’s lead in the other and led them back to his roan.
Mounting up, he brought the horse around and stopped knee to knee with the youngster. “I figger this can be easy for both of us, or it can be hard on you. You behave yourself and you can ride like a man. You don’t behave— why, I’ll strap you over that there horse like two elk hindquarters. So it’s up to you.”
Scratch was just starting to put his heels into his horse’s ribs—when he stopped, his eye caught by that whistle hung against the boy’s chest. Bass turned a moment to gaze at the body on the limbs, then realized what he had done had one more step before all would be complete.
“You’ll wanna blow your kinfolk’s whistle, son,” he said quietly as he leaned over and grabbed the eagle wingbone, holding it up to the youngster’s lips.
The boy stared at him a moment, bewildered. Eventually he opened his mouth, leaned his head forward, and took the end of the whistle between his teeth.
Scratch settled himself in the saddle and nudged his horse forward, turning the roan about as he clucked for the lead horse to follow. The animal that carried Titus Bass’s young prisoner started away behind the white man.
And as they inched out of the skeletal shadows of that copse of cottonwoods onto the brilliant, shimmering white beauty of that pristine wilderness illuminated with a newly risen sun, Titus Bass heard the first tentative, eerie … and ultimately mournful notes of that eagle-wingbone whistle shriek behind him.
Unmistakably a warrior’s song: unearthly notes meant to accompany a fighting man’s soul on its lonely journey to that place where all warriors one day were bound to go.
It could have been a lot harder than it was, but for some reason the youngster understood that Titus Bass was just about his only means of staying alive.
That boy could have attempted an escape once, if not a dozen times over the next three days. At the least he could have struggled with the old white man when Bass led him to the pony, or when Titus helped him down from the horse. The youngster could have simply run off into the forest with his hands tied when he had to pee or squat.
But the Blackfoot was old enough to savvy which side his meat was roasted on. While he might hate the white man who had killed his kin or kith, and while he might well be scheming to make an escape of it somewhere down the line—the boy showed he was smart enough not to give the slightest impression that he might flee if given half a chance.
Not for a moment did Scratch think that the youngster wouldn’t sink a knife in the white man’s heart if he could get his hands on a weapon and was handed the opportunity. Why, it’d be damned foolish for him to believe this half-growed creature had suddenly turned docile. Not no young’un from such a warrior clan as the Blackfoot. Such a man-child was bred, born, whelped, and raised to be a fighter. In the marrow of him, Scratch knew Blackfoot were taught to hate Americans from the time they opened their eyes and sucked in their first breath. Taught to hate Crow too.
So what in the billy blue hell was he doing? Here he was, a white man—the one big argument against his indecision. And he was married to a Crow. Jehoshaphat! If the Blackfoot hated any group longer, hated any group stronger, than Americans—it was the goddamned Crow! A second powerful argument against his good-hearted charity.
Then you went and added the fact that in Yellow Belly’s village there were his two young children—half white and half Crow. Lordy! A third and a fourth mark against Titus Bass ever making a friend of the boy. What he needed to do was just turn the Blackfoot loose and ride away. Let the youngster go afoot, even give him some dried meat before he pointed him in the right direction. How had he ever been so foolish to believe that the boy might hold some compassion in his heart for the white man who had killed his blood kin?
Even
There was no changing what either of them were, and would always be. Enemies.
It was simply the order of things, and no mere mortal of a clay-footed man was going to change it.
For the most part over those next three days, it seemed the youngster rode along with his eyes as good as closed. If they were open at all, they were no more than slits because of the intense sunlight reflecting off that new snow. Especially during the late-afternoon when the sun was setting in the west, far, far in front of them—that’s when the glare grew most cruel. It made no matter to Titus if the boy was sleeping as they plodded along, picking their way among and around the snowdrifts, doing his best to stay to the high runs where the snow hadn’t piled up so deep or had been blown clear altogether.
It made no difference to the old beaver trapper … because the boy never made any trouble for him. The Blackfoot ate when meat was offered him. And he drank when Titus gave him the melted snow in a tin, or provided a cup of weak coffee at their night fires. When Scratch’s eyes grew heavy beneath the clear, cold pinpricks of white light shining through the black-velvet drape of winter light, he would crab over to the youngster and check one last time to see that the knots were secure, that those knots on the long lead rope itself were turned toward the wrist so the boy had no chance whatever to work his fingers on them. Then Titus would retuck the old blanket and a buffalo robe around the youngster before he crabbed back to his own sleeping robes once more, dragging the end of the long lead rope to tuck beneath his belt, to wrap a loop around a wrist: the slightest movement of his prisoner would alert the boy’s keeper.
Come his rising of a morning, Scratch would find the youngster hadn’t budged and had to be awakened. In the end Titus admitted to himself that there was no plotting to escape. That the boy didn’t lie awake while the trapper drifted off so he could slip off in the dark with one of the horses, stealing one of those extra guns Bass had plundered off of one dead Indian after another over the seasons.
Right from that moment Scratch had put the body in the tree and placed the dead man’s whistle between the youngster’s lips, the Blackfoot pony holder hadn’t given the slightest hint of struggle or treachery.
So it was that early on the fourth afternoon after the untimely convergence of their fates that Titus Bass spotted a low, thin blanket of fire smoke trapped in the cold sky, a grayish-brown band of it clinging just above the trees … and knew it had to be the Crow. If not Yellow Belly’s band, then surely they were Crow.
At the top of the rimrock, Scratch brought them to a halt and let the animals blow. He turned in the saddle, looking at the boy, and could see the youngster had noticed the fire smoke too. When those black-cherry eyes shifted to peer into his, Titus could plainly read the fear that was turning to resignation. A look that seemed to say,
It was then that Bass understood what he had to do.
With a sudden sense of urgency, he realized they had little time before the sun would be making its descent.
“C’mon.
He clucked to the horses, his eyes briefly brushing the boy’s face, recognizing that the youngster was baffled again. Just when the boy had made peace with the fact that he was being led to torture and eventual slaughter, the white man was turning their little pack train away from the fire smoke and heading down the back side of the rimrocks instead of pushing on for the village that lay ahead in a horseshoe bend of the river.
It took them something more than an hour before Bass felt they had come far enough. They hadn’t crossed any pony tracks, so it was clear the Crow hunters weren’t yet working this side of the river for game. Here, two ridges beyond the north bank of the Yellowstone, Bass slid from his saddle and hit the snow, breaking through the three-day-old crust and sinking past his ankles.
Immediately he went to the boy’s side and motioned that he would help the youngster climb down too. When the Blackfoot stood unsteadily in the deep snow, Scratch pointed to his groin, pantomiming how a man held himself while urinating before he gestured toward the ten-foot-high willows nearby.
“G’won. Be ’bout your business, over there.”
The boy stood frozen a moment until Scratch threw down that coil of lead rope he held in a mitten. A bit reluctantly, the youngster turned away to trudge toward the thick brush.
The moment he did, Bass tore his mittens off as he hurried back to one of the war party’s ponies, where Titus began to work at the knots holding the blanket and buffalo robe the boy had been using the past few nights—
