was, tying the pieces of broken, discarded lodgepoles across tree branches for her scaffold, the hot tears spilling down his cold cheeks and disappearing into his whitening beard. After Waits and Magpie had cleaned the old woman’s body and dressed it in her finest, they sewed the body up in a brand-new blue blanket—her mother’s favorite color—a blanket brought north from Fort Bridger as a gift to the old one. Now it would weather in the rains and snows, in the ceaseless winds that haunted this high, hard land. The bright blue blanket slowly rotting like the body sewn inside it, returning to the winds that moaned through the bones that would bleach beneath the sun, winter and summer, and winter again in that endless circle that was life, and death, and life anew.
On the village moved, under the new chief—Pretty On Top—Titus’s old friend.* Over the years the once-impetuous horse thief who had been but a brash and daring youngster when Titus met him twenty winters ago had become a warrior of great note, offering wise counsel, bravely holding off his people’s enemies, kind and thoughtful in the tradition of the great Arapooesh. Often were the times when Bass had hoped a young leader much like Pretty On Top would court his daughter when her time came. But in the past few weeks those hopes had been hung out to dry. During this warming time of the year, when thunderstorms rumbled out of the west and Magpie celebrated her eighteenth spring, the first suitor to come scratching at the door-pole was Don’t Mix.
“Stay away from my lodge,” Scratch grumbled at the handsome suitor. “Don’t come around me or my daughter and there won’t be trouble between us.”
The brash young warrior took a step back and spread out his arms indignantly. “There doesn’t have to be any trouble for us, Uncle,” he said, using that familiar term of respect for an older man. Don’t Mix glanced left, and he looked right. “I don’t see any other young man come to call on your daughter. I think I am the only one who will marry her.”
“Go away,” Titus snapped. He did not like the man’s cockiness, wondering too if he had ever come off sounding so sure of himself when he was a youngster full of rutting juice. “Even if you are the last one she could marry in all of Absaroka, I would still not accept your presents!”
“One day soon I will bring you a lot of presents, Uncle.” The young man again used that term of familial closeness that served only to grate down Scratch’s backbone. “But for now—I must first make Magpie fall in love with me. So I will return tonight with my flute and play love songs for her.”
“I’m warning you—don’t come back,” Bass hissed menacingly, his eyes narrowed at the warrior who started to turn away with a wide grin on his handsome face. “You will make a lot of trouble for yourself if you bother my family.”
“Tell your daughter I will play my music for only her,” Don’t Mix promised, as if he hadn’t paid any attention to the white man’s warning, “tonight, when the moon rises off the hills.”
“No one will be listening!” he bellowed at the young man’s back, angrier still as the warrior walked away.
“Don’t treat him so badly,” his wife said behind him.
Surprised, Titus turned there in front of the lodge and found Waits-by-the-Water stepping from the open doorway. Right behind her came Magpie.
“Why shouldn’t I treat him that way if I don’t like him, don’t want him around Magpie?”
Glancing quickly at her daughter, Waits said, “We don’t have to like our daughter’s suitor, Ti-tuzz.”
“W-we don’t?” he asked, bewildered by his wife’s assertion as his youngest daughter followed them into the sunlight. “Wait, I get it. I suppose this is again one of those matters of the heart that a man is simply too stupid to figure out.”
His wife took one of his old, bony hands in both of hers and said, “No, we don’t have to like our daughter’s suitor. Only she has to.”
It slowly dawned on him, the way the sun came up at the edge of the earth. He looked from his wife’s face to Magpie’s. “Is this true, daughter?”
Magpie bent to pick up her younger sister and positioned the child across her left hip. “I think he is handsome, Popo.”
“You’ve told your mother this, and you did not tell me?”
Magpie dropped her eyes. “We’ve talked about him, the two of us, yes.”
“Your daughter told me of her feelings, Ti-tuzz,” Waits explained to her angry husband. “Don’t Mix is a very handsome young man. Any girl would be proud if he came to court her with his flute songs under the stars.”
“Even though I never played a flute for you—”
“You didn’t have to, husband,” she declared. “I already knew my heart belonged to you. Your flute songs didn’t have to capture it from me.”
After a moment of fuming that he was the last to be let in on this secret, he asked, “Are you trying to talk me into accepting this Don’t Mix with your sweet words, woman?”
“No, think for yourself, husband. Don’t Mix is a good warrior—since we met him those winters ago, you have seen how many successful raids he has led. Not only his good friends like Stiff Arm and Three Irons and Turns Back, but many others are always ready to go on Don’t Mix’s raids into the land of the Blackfoot or the Lakota.”
He did his best to calm the squirm of apprehension wriggling inside him, feeling as if these two women had already made up their minds and now they were going to twist him around to their way of thinking about this young suitor.
“So Don’t Mix is a handsome man—”
“Very handsome, Popo,” Magpie interrupted with an enthusiasm that made her eyes sparkle. “The most handsome man in the camp!”
Titus continued, “And he is a good war leader too.”
“Yes,” Waits replied. “As a man, that is something you can easily agree on. You want a strong war leader for your daughter’s husband.”
“Wait!” he growled, holding up his hand as he whirled on Magpie. “Your mother is telling me you not only are ready to have suitors call on our lodge, ready to let them play their flute songs for you and talk to you beneath the blanket … but you are ready to marry?”
Her head nodded tentatively. “Are you angry because I want to marry?”
That made him stop and consider a moment. “I … I don’t know, Magpie. Perhaps I am not ready to think of my little girl moving away from her mother and father, marrying a man and leaving us to start her own family.”
“But I am not moving away,” Magpie protested. “I will always be close. We will live in the same village.”
“W-we?” he stammered. “Already you and Don’t Mix are a
Waits quickly hoisted little Crane from Magpie’s arms and set the child on her own hip, laying an arm over Magpie’s shoulders as she said, “Your oldest daughter has had her eye on that handsome young warrior ever since that first day we came back from the Blanket Chief’s post on Black’s Fork, when Don’t Mix proclaimed just how beautiful he thought Magpie was.”
Titus looked at his daughter closely. “You have made up your mind on him?”
“Yes.” Then she tried out her winning smile on him.
“There is nothing I can say to convince you to leave your mind open and entertain other suitors until you can decide among them?”
Waits answered quickly, “This is not a matter of her mind, Ti-tuzz. This is a matter for her heart.”
“I want Don’t Mix to play his flute songs for me,” Magpie said, holding up her folded hands before her as if pleading with her father. “I want all the other girls in camp to see him courting me—all those other girls who swoon when they watch him walk past them, when they talk about him among themselves at the creekbank. I want them to be so jealous of me.”
He wagged his head slowly now, eventually admitting, “I have never been afraid of taking on two enemies at one time in battle. Most often, they get in one another’s way. But against the two of you … I am beaten even before I can start!”
“You will let Don’t Mix come to our lodge and play his love songs for our daughter?” asked Waits-by-the- Water.
Titus nodded once, very grudgingly.
Magpie lunged against him, wrapping her arms around him tightly. “Oh, Popo! You will never be sorry for letting me have who I want for a husband.”
Laying his cheek down on the top of her head, he breathed in the sweet smell of her hair and remembered how Waits-by-the-Water had scented her own braids with crushed sage and dried wildflowers in the days of her
