hide forgotten or ignored by a hunter, a hide that wouldn’t be salted for tanning.
“Hurry, Magpie,” he urged her as they lumbered past some of those last lodges in the crescent.
After all those miles and months—he suddenly couldn’t cross these last few yards fast enough. Afraid. Downright terrified at what Waits-by-the-Water believed had happened to him.
“There, Popo,” she said quietly as she came to a stop.
He halted beside her, looked into her face.
Magpie pointed. “There.”
Scratch swallowed as he turned to watch Flea come up, leading the saddle horse. More than two dozen people approached on both sides of his pack string. They stopped in silence, not uttering a sound as he quickly licked his parched lips and stepped over to the entrance of that lodge where a tiny tendril of smoke crept upward through a gaping, black opening between the smoke flaps. Already his hands were trembling when he reached out to rest his rifle against the lodge skins and shoved the door flap aside.
Ducking inside, he stood, waiting, adjusting his eyes to the inky darkness. Outside one of the horses snorted, and he heard the quiet murmuring of voices. Then it grew quiet enough that he could hear her breathing.
“Waits?”
There was no answer. But as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he was able to locate her in what dim light was radiated by the still-glowing embers in the fire pit. No fire, not even any low flames. Nothing more than a few coals left in that rocky circle.
Bass quickly knelt and found the firewood that she always stacked just to the left of the doorway. If their mother was in severe mourning, then Magpie and Flea would have gone in search of wood, collected water too. His hands felt along several small branches, then turned in a crouch and laid them on the coals. Grabbing his long hair with one hand to hold it out of the ashes, Titus bent low and began to blow on the coals. It took some doing, but after a few moments the dry wood leapt into flame.
Still on his hands and knees, Scratch crabbed around the fire pit toward the rear of the lodge—guided by the rasp of her labored breathing. Waits-by-the-Water lay beneath a buffalo robe, no—two of them lying askew and rumpled where she had crawled beneath them for warmth.
Frightened so much his own breath froze in his chest like a tightened fist, Titus pulled back the robe, finding her heavy winter moccasins. He instantly leaped in the other direction and dragged back the robe from her head. She had her face turned from him as she slept, her labored breathing hard and shallow.
“Waits … I’ve come home.”
When he had whispered, Scratch lifted her shoulders, pulled her upper body across his lap, turning her gently
“Is it really you?” she creaked in a voice so weak it reminded him of the time he almost lost her to that Blackfoot pox. “Not a ghost come to haunt my heart?”
“I am h-here, woman,” his voice cracked as the tears began to seep from his eyes anew. “Here, touch my face. Know that I am real.”
With one of his hands, he searched under the robe for hers. Finding it, he brought her fingers to his cheek, quickly guided it over his eyes, down his nose, from ear to ear in that graying beard. Then—consumed by his need to know—his fingers inched down her wrist to her forearm … feeling the striations of her self-wounding. Long ridges of new scabs intermingled with older scars where the bloody crust had aged and sloughed itself off over time. Reaching down, he gently ran his hand the length of her calf. It wasn’t as scarified as her forearm, and the scabs on them were older. No recent slashes.
So he wrapped her in his arms, squeezed her tightly against him, enfolding her as he cried. Rocking, rocking. Crooning to her one of those lullabies he made up and used to hum to their children as he cradled them in his lap— just the way he was holding her at this moment.
And she cried. Waits-by-the-Water reached up to touch his face, fingers brushing his eyelids, feeling his lips as he sang in a whisper. While she sobbed, her chest heaved with great convulsions.
“I was so afraid,” she eventually managed to choke the words out. “In the middle of the summer, when you did not come back—I began to worry. We had been together so many summers, I know it is never a good time for your trapping.”
Yes, she did know so much of who he was. More than any other person—man or woman—could ever know. His tears began to stream freely now.
“I hoped you would come back from the mountains for to trade with Tullock at his fort,” she whispered raspily, quaking against his chest. “But, I worried even more when the weather began to cool, and the leaves began to d—die.”
Bass bent his head and pressed his lips against her forehead, tasting the old, rancid ash she had smeared on her flesh. “It was unfair—what I’ve done to you and the children. I did not realize my journey would take so long.”
“I knew you had to be dead because you had never been gone from me, from your family, for so long.”
“Never again,” he promised.
“Sometime late in the summer, I realized it could not be the trapping that kept you from returning to us,” she continued, dragging a hand across her own cheek grown muddy with tears that streaked the ashes rubbed there. “It had to be something more than the trapping—”
“I rode far, very far away to steal horses.”
“Alone?”
“I went with old friends … and men who were my enemies too. We went to the land of the Mexicans.” And he spoke that last word in English.
“Mexicans?” she repeated in his tongue. “You went south to Ta-house to steal horses … where Magpie was born?”
“No, to the other land of the Mexicans. Far to the west, by the big water.”
“W-was it a pretty land?”
“To some it would be a pretty country,” he admitted, lifting her chin with a finger so he could stare into her red, punished eyes. “But, there is nothing so beautiful as this high land of rugged skies, far prairie, and tall mountains.”
“Did you bring your Mexican horses with you to Absaroka?”
“No. The ones I brought with me are better than any Mexican horse, because they are older than those we stole. I traded them from the Cheyenne down at Bents Fort.”
“I remember you showing me the fort of dirt walls when Magpie was a suckling baby.”
“All the rest of those horses I no longer wanted, I traded away for a few goods.”
“You are going to be a trader now, like Tullock?”
He finally felt relieved enough now to chuckle a little. “No. I could never be a trader, woman. The goods I brought back are gifts to my family, gifts to your people who watched over you and our children while I was away for so long.”
“So you did not steal many Mexican horses?”
This time he laughed louder. “Oh, we took nearly every horse we could find from those Mexicans—and they have many! Let me tell you that my old friends and me started out of the land of the Mexicans with more horses than all of Yellow Belly’s village has in its herd, twice as many!”
She stared at him in the firelight with such seriousness, gazing from his good eye to the bad one for some sign of betrayal. “No. There could not be that many horses except … except if you raided the land of the Blackfoot to the north—or maybe the Lakota far to the east.”
“I tell you the truth,” he said with pride. “We took more horses from those Mexicans than ever was taken from them before!”
“I cannot believe the Mexicans had that many you could steal from under their noses without a terrible fight.”
“Oh, they were sorely mad at what we had done and sent their fighting men after us—but we pushed them back and started across a great wasteland.”
