For the next three winters a deep, unrelenting cold was visited upon the north country, keeping the men close to their lodge fires, yearning for spring when they could return to stealing horses, raising plunder, and squandering the finest seasons of their young lives.
Far too cold that no tribe did much raiding until the weather finally warmed weeks after the equinox. Altogether, it was a string of four winters unlike any the Crow had ever known—four years when the tribe wrapped itself in a growing sense of invincibility and security that come each winter, no thoughts of danger or guarded wariness need trouble all of Absaroka.
But through each spring, summer, and into the early autumn before that first freeze … it was a celebration of the old life. Throughout the land those few men who could remember a time before the coming of the whites were growing long in tooth and dim of eye, their shoulders stooped with age and their infirmities, eyes rheumy with their years, their exploits, their memories a great and glorious day now gone on the winds.
That first of those next four winters was a time that was like no other Bass had experienced among the Crow. And he knew that come a day soon no man alive would ever remember the halcyon days before beaver pelts and buffalo robes changed everything in the northern mountains forever.
When he had first come among the Absaroka long ago, Titus was as an outsider—wintering with the three thieves who posed as partners. Although befriended by Bird In Ground, the young Apsaluuke with a powerful man/woman medicine, Bass had remained an outsider until he returned to the Crow alone. Eventually he took a Crow woman in the manner of the country, and she birthed their half-breed children. Yet, despite how much his old friend Arapooesh had hoped for the acceptance of his white friend, the band was reluctant to treat him as one of their own. Even after he stood beside his woman in the promising ceremony, or went to avenge the Blackfoot bringing the pox south of the Yellowstone, or when he named his third child in the old manner of things … he still could not shake that sense of aloneness, of standing apart from his wife’s people.
No, it was not until that next spring after the naming when he did not make ready his horses, did not load burdens upon them, and did not depart for weeks, even moons, on end in that way of a white man. Instead, he stayed. Most of the Crow expected him to pick up and be gone one of those bright spring days, but he stayed. Word among them rumored of the promise he had made to his wife and their children.
“He has come to the blanket,” someone said. “Now he wants to be one of us.”
“Perhaps,” others agreed guardedly, “but—we all remember the stories of the Medicine Calf* and how he took to the blanket, only to forsake us when it suited him.”
“This one is not like Medicine Calf,” another would say assuredly. “Medicine Calf was lured and seduced back to the land of the white men. But the gray-bearded coyote, Waits-by-the-Water’s man … he left nothing behind there in the land of the white men. He claims no family, no friends back there. He knows no other home but this.”
Titus Bass stayed on, season after season—while other white men had always come and gone, like footloose transients come only in search of the furs before they were gone again. Now the beaver trade had breathed its last—a final, wheezing death rattle all could hear rumble with its final gasp. No more did the Crow happen upon any trapping parties, much less the huge brigades that used to winter anywhere from the big bend of the Yellowstone east to the Bighorn, perhaps as far as the Tongue. The only whites they chanced to see now were a trader and his engages who sat out the seasons in their tiny post at the mouth of one river or another on the Yellowstone.
Rumors floated into Absaroka of traders far to the south, said to have built their posts somewhere on the lower Green River where, so the Snake and Bannock tribes told Crow hunting parties, Big Throat Bridger had stacked up log walls and begun housekeeping with his Indian family and a few white partners.
But up in this country, the era of the white man was behind them now. The only white face any of them ever saw outside of that of the post trader’s was an aging, wind- and sun-ravaged face that Titus Bass had dragged around with him for seasons beyond count. He had stayed. Because they saw he did not leave in the way of all other white men, the Crow gradually came to accept him as part of their lives. With every season he became more like them: his children growing up among theirs, hunting with their men, joining with the other old warriors to counsel those young men gathering in war parties or preparing to set off on raids into foreign lands. He and old fighters like him always stayed behind to guard Absaroka, to protect the camp, if need be to put their lives between the enemy and their women and children.
While the young men rode far and wide carrying forth the glory of the Crow, it was always the old warriors who stood as the last great fortress of Absaroka—arrayed like a bulwark there against the many Blackfoot to the north, the Cheyenne on the south, and those Lakota who were migrating out of the east. The old men knew what the land of the Crow had always been … and they stood ready to defend what they prayed Absaroka always would be. So Titus Bass stayed.
How often in those circles of the seasons did he look back on those glorious days following the naming ceremony!
With the help of his children, each cold morning Scratch loaded up one of the packhorses with two great bundles of goods and walked through the camp. At the poorest of lodges the three of them would stop and he would ask what that family could most use—a new, thick blanket, perhaps? Or maybe a kettle? Some cloth for a new dress or to wrap up a young child?
“A man who holds too tightly to his riches,” Titus reminded his children during their daily ritual, “he will forever stay a poor man in the eyes of others. But a man who lets his riches flow from his fingers—”
“He,” Magpie finished his oft-repeated admonition, “is a man who is rich beyond compare in the eyes of his people.”
“To give away his wealth,” young Flea repeated his father’s moral, “is what marks a man truly blessed by the Creator Above.”
So a brass kettle went to some, an iron skillet to others, and those new blankets to shelter one from the brutal cold that had visited itself upon the north country. And there were earrings, rolls of brass wire, and domed tacks for decoration he put in the hands of many of Yellow Belly’s band. A rainbow of colorful ribbon, tiny waxed packets of vermillion, not to mention a myriad of other small tools, decorations, and sewing goods he pulled from his packs like a peddlar as he and the children inched their way through camp for the next four days. Something for every lodge, especially those families who needed the most. This sharing of riches was a lesson like no other he could teach his children.
What joy it was to return to the lodge when they were done with their day—finding it warmed by a merry fire, the babe asleep, its tummy filled, and Waits-by-the-Water busy at supper, or working her colored quills onto some strip of soft antelope hide, or sewing up a new pair of moccasins for one of the children. More times than not, their feet outgrew old moccasins before those moccasins wore out.
After nearly a moon at this site, the crier brought word that they would move in two days. Time to pack up, make ready with what they owned, repair old travois hitches. The grass was gone, the firewood too. Besides, the camp had begun to stink with the offal and refuse of those hundreds.
Less than a dozen slow miles away, the camp chiefs had already decided upon a new site nestled in the lee of a hill. While the spot did not possess any meadows near as free of snow as the last camp, Yellow Belly’s people did find plenty of wood, and some open water where a spring fed a nearby creek even though most every other stream was frozen from bank to bank.
For days at a time throughout the long and horrid winters, the Crow were imprisoned in camp, if not in their lodges, unwilling to brave the terrible winds and brutal temperatures brought with each new storm. But the weather always moderated, the sun reappeared, and the first, resolute hunting parties embarked in search of what game would be out to feed with the passing of the storms.
It didn’t take long for him to realize that life was growing easier than he could ever remember it having been. Almost from the time he ran away from the homestead and put Boone County at his back, Titus Bass had made a living from the muscles in his back and the sweat of his brow. But it wasn’t brawn that allowed him to endure. Some might well claim he had survived more by virtue of his wits than by his wisdom—so be it. Whether it was toting up bales and baggage at riverport towns on the Ohio or the Mississippi, or sweating over anvil and forge in St. Louis, even unto immersing himself up to the balls in high-country streams little more than liquid ice for months at a time—nearly every function of his life over the past twenty-some winters Out here in the mountains had aged his body that much quicker than it would have aged had he stayed back in those peaceful, predictable settlements.
In adapting to life with the Crow he lulled himself into peaceful rhythms that most suited a man who had
