causing a breeze to drift down from their mountains that lay off to the southwest. He’d never seen one for himself, but the Crow steadfastly believed in these beings who were half human, half furry creature. Ever since the Apsaluuke people had come to this land from the Missouri River, they had been visited by the Little People. The beings came to heal the sick and wounded when the Crow healers could not. They came to protect the faithful who believed in them. And, they sometimes portrayed their sense of humor too—often making off with some small object or another that they took a liking to. From time to time a Crow man or woman might realize they were missing something shiny and explain that the Little People had taken it. Then, years later, they would find the missing object lying on a prominent rock, or hanging from a tree branch beside a well-used trail somewhere in those mystical “children’s footprint mountains,”* always in plain sight where a shiny trinket would sparkle, catching the rays of the sun.
He tried to imagine what shape the creatures took, how they looked—because while every one of the Crow believed in the Little People, few, if any, had ever had themselves a good look at one of the mysterious and sacred creatures. Most times, the elders and prophets, seers and healers caught no more than a glimpse of the Little People out of the corner of their eyes. The hint of a shadow, the mere suggestion of fleeting movement … because the legends always told of the Little People doing their good in secret, away from the eyes of man.
Titus felt himself dreaming at last. Floating up the mountainside toward the cool and inviting darkness lit by a bright full moon and innumerable stars that seemed so close he felt he could reach out and tap each one, even set his big-brimmed hat right down on top of that gauzy, gibbous moon. He heard a rustling on either side of him and stopped, looking down to realize the horse that had been between his legs was somehow gone … and he was standing barefoot in the cool grass, the breeze nuzzling his long, graying hair. He turned to the side at the sounds of tiny feet scampering, but glimpsed only a half dozen shadows as they disappeared behind the trees.
From his right he heard more faint rustling and turned that way to look. All he saw was the tail end of some flickering movement as the creatures vanished before he ever saw them.
When he held his breath and concentrated, Titus heard the whispers. Straining into the black of that night, he listened intently, straining to make out the sounds. Voices, but not quite human. And the language they spoke … not anything he had ever heard spoken before in his fifty-seven winters on earth. For sure not American, but not Ute or Snake, Comanche or Crow either, not even what little Blackfoot or Mojave had fallen about his ears, and not a thing like Mexican talk.
Scratch took a deep breath and let half of it out, the same way he held a breath in his lungs when he was aiming his rifle … then listened some more, doing his best to recognize a word, some fragment of the foreign sounds.
These had to be Little People, he decided. For some reason, he knew he was the only human around these parts. Titus wasn’t sure why he felt so certain about that … but, after all, this was his dream. While the Crow could accept that they would never really see one of the creatures, Titus Bass wasn’t a Crow. He wanted to see one of them, talk to it—have the being talk with him, perhaps even show him some of their magic that so amazed generation after generation of the Apsaluuke people. Waits-by-the-Water and their children could believe in these holy beings out of hand, but Titus wanted to see for himself some of their notorious tricks and sleight of hand. The Crow had many long-held legends about Old Man Coyote—the well-known spiritual trickster … so maybe these sacred Little People had some tricks they could teach him.
“Come out here an’ lemme take a look at you.”
He heard a rustling to his left, then felt a brushing against the back of his leg. But as soon as he looked, it was gone.
“Stand still, so I can have me a good look afore you run away again.”
Scratch suddenly turned at more rustling, trying his best to catch a glimpse, for he was sure they were all around him at that very moment—and as soon as he had turned his head he felt as if something had trundled across his toes, the way a badger or porcupine might, had they not been such slow and lumbering creatures.
“Titus Bass.”
He understood that.
He grinned and said to the night, “You do speak American after all.”
“We talk so you understand us, yes,” the voice answered. “In the tongue of the listener.”
“Why won’t you show yourself to me?”
There was a pause while more leaves and branches rustled on all sides of him. Then the voice said, “We never show ourselves to you until you need us.”
Scratch smiled at that. “I need to see you, know you’re real an’ not just some dream of mine.”
“Dream? Why, you’re dreaming right now, aren’t you, Titus Bass?”
“Yep, s’pose I am.”
“Then—if this is your dream, you should realize this is very real,” the voice said as the rustling quieted.
He struggled to wrap his mind around that. Not since that night at Fort Bridger so many years ago had he given any thought to the two opposing worlds of unreality and dream, any thought to that unknown country where the two worlds converged, where they could ensnare a man into belief.
So he begged, “Why can’t you lemme see you?”
“Not till you need us,” the voice sounded soft, and only in his head, as if his ears weren’t hearing it. Instead, as if it were just inside his head all along. “Not till you really … need us badly.”
“When? When’s a man really need you badly?”
“Are you wounded?”
“No, I ain’t wounded.”
“Then you aren’t dying?”
“No,” he said testily. “I told you, I ain’t wounded an’ I ain’t dying.”
“Then why did you call us here to help you?” the voice sounded, edgy with anger. “We can’t understand why you’ve come here to this place and why you brought us here to help you.”
“Don’t you ’member: I’m dreaming this,” he reminded them. “I’m dreaming I was ridin’ up this mountain, into these here trees—when I thought I heard noise. I wasn’t thinking of you Little People, not thinkin’ ’bout your kind at all till I heard you movin’ around out there in the brush.”
He heard the immediate scampering of feet, untold numbers of feet, fading into the night.
“Wait!” he pleaded. “Don’t go!”
From farther away, this time certainly not within his head at all, the voice replied, “We have others to see to, Titus Bass. Ones who are in need of healing, people who are very ill—those who are dying—and the First Maker has sent us to find them because we are the only ones who can save them.”
“I ain’t sick … an’ I ain’t dyin’ neither,” he groaned. “I just wanted to get my own self a look at you.”
Now the voice whispered, so far away it was just barely audible. “You will see us one day, Titus Bass. But not until that day when there is nothing anyone can do to save you.”
“S-save me?”
“You will see us at last … on that day when you are prepared to die.”
* The Pryor Mountains, in present-day south-central Montana.
TWENTY-SIX
“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat, Meldrum!” Scratch shouted above the noisy hubbub of those war chiefs and headmen pressing up behind them. “I’ll be et for the devil’s tater if’n that don’t look ever’ bit like ronnyvoo camps down there!”
“Can’t claim as I ever saw that many Injuns in one place myself!” Robert Meldrum hollered. “Look at all them lodges and pony herds too.”
Both of those white men could understand the Crow tongue being growled back and forth among the thirty- eight warriors, chiefs, and old headmen who had accepted Tom Fitzpatrick’s invitation to join the other tribes of the High Plains and Rocky Mountains at this momentous gathering near Fort Laramie. These men of the north had every
