managed to scare up in the coulees and at the foot of the ridges as they plodded north for the Yellowstone. When at last they would reach the land of the Apsaluuke and found Pretty On Top’s people, they could crowd in with daughter Magpie, her husband, Turns Back, and what was sure to be their first child of their own. As soon as Titus, Turns Back, and Flea could, they would hunt for enough robes the women would flesh free of hair, grain to a smooth finish, then sew together to construct a small lodge for Waits-by-the-Water, replacing the one burned by the Mormon raiders.
By midwinter, life would return to normal. Something as close to normal as it could be for a man and his family who had lost a stillborn child, had everything else he had accumulated over the years either carted away to Salt Lake City or burned to uselessness in the cinder-choked ash heap that was Jim Bridger’s fort. What bright hope it had taken to raise those walls back in ’43, more than ten winters ago. The same hope that now carried Scratch and his family north through the short days, traveling between sunup and sundown, huddling through the long, bitter, winter nights as they chattered of the joy to come with seeing the faces of family and friends, gazing at familiar landmarks and that place a man called his home.
That used-to-be country where things might just stay the way they always had been for … just a little longer. A hope that it would be for all of them as it always had been for just … a little longer.
If that could be called a prayer, then it was the prayer of Titus Bass. The plea of a man who found himself caught in a world he did not recognize, a world where he felt lost and adrift. Better for him to flee that world the white man was changing into his own image. Far, far better for Titus Bass to strike out for what he knew, for what he remembered was tangible, for what he could embrace as the way things had always been, and might always be. That didn’t make him a coward, did it? he asked the First Maker. To escape all that he knew was wrong, to flee where he knew men still valued honor above all? As he considered it, Scratch tallied up every ill and evil wind that had befallen his family—from the attack by the Arapaho in Bayou Salade to the troubles for Magpie at Fort John, hired St. Louis killers to the devastation of the smallpox, Comanche kidnappers to a Taos uprising … against one travail after another they had prevailed, until Brigham Young’s Mormons came riding into their lives to kill their friends and steal everything Titus Bass had ever owned. And all of their troubles seemed to happen south of Crow country.
So this was the best a man could do—taking his family north away from all the trials they had ever encountered. Up there along the Yellowstone, back into the country of the River and Mountain Crow bands, life had remained virtually unchanged over these last twenty-some years. Few white men had ever come, fewer still had stayed on. The Blackfoot had their post up at the mouth of the Marias. The Assiniboine, their Fort Union at the mouth of the Yellowstone. And the Crow had “Round Iron” Robert Meldrum at Fort Alexander near the mouth of the Rosebud. Despite those far-flung outposts, few white men had come to stay … sure as hell not the way it was to the south, from the Sweetwater and Devil’s Gate country all the way down to troubled and bloody Taos. Once a man got on the north side of Shoshone land and was headed into Absaroka, he would find life was quieter, more predictable, this far north—
“Friend!”
Scratch jerked back on the reins and brought the old rifle up, realizing he had been dozing, daydreaming, not paying a goddamned bit of attention. Behind him he heard Flea’s hoofbeats as the youngster’s pony hurried him from the far right flank.
He blinked in the waning light of that windy winter afternoon. Blinked again, clearing the water from his one good eye, and found the figure emerging from the brush. He wasn’t sure what to think, what the devil to expect as Flea galloped closer, protectively vigilant in the face of any danger to his father. But, that was not the sort of term an enemy would use, was it?
“Who calls me friend?” he demanded of the figure bundled in a long capote and fur cap, heavy hide mittens.
“I am Slays in the Night!” the man cried. “You ’member me, Ti-tuzz friend?”
“Damn, if it ain’t you now!” he exclaimed as he reined up near the old warrior. He looked about quickly while the lone Indian scuffled over, his moccasins crunching through the ankle-deep snow, dodging clumps of sage and juniper. He gazed at the face of this old friend with wonder now as the Shoshone’s features took sharper focus. “What the hell you doin’ out this far from your stompin’ grounds, down south at the hot springs? A mite close to Crow country for your likin’, ain’t it?”
“I come looking …” he started to explain, then stared at the ground, as would a man searching for the words.
“Lookin’ for what? Where’s that woman of your’n? What’s her name? Painted Rock? Something such—”
“Red Paint Rock.” He looked up, his eyes filled with great pain when he interrupted. “She is gone.”
“That’s a damn shame, friend,” he said quietly, glancing at Flea as he struggled to find some words. “I know how that can cut a man to the marrow to have your wife die on you—”
“No die. She is gone.”
He squinted at the Indian for a moment, then dropped from the saddle. Waving his wife and family to close up and join him, Scratch asked, “Gone? She run off from you?”
“Blackfeet!” Slays snarled the word.
Of a sudden he remembered how Washakie had informed the party of old trappers that the Blackfoot were raiding, far south of their usual haunts. “You see ’em come through?”
His head bobbed. “North,” and he started to sign as well as speak his birth tongue to tell the story. “Big war party of Blackfeet. Sweeping north. Striking down the Bighorn River … riding strong. Very big war party, go for Crow country.”
“They hit Washakie’s camp,” Titus said. “But his warriors were too strong for them Blackfoot.”
“Washakie,” he repeated the chief’s name. “We were friends … long time ago.”
Stepping closer to the old Shoshone, Scratch noticed again just how gray the man’s hair had become in the last few years—the black streaked with the snows of many, many winters and more than his share of trials too. He laid a hand on the Indian’s shoulder. “They kill Red Paint Rock, or they run off with her?”
He swallowed. “Take her,” he signed, one hand suddenly sailing off the other. “She is not a pretty woman. She’s no good to them. Why take my Red Paint Rock from me?”
“They took her,” Scratch explained to his wife as Waits-by-the-Water and the children came to a halt behind him on foot, leading their horses. “That means she’s still bound to be alive.”
Suddenly the old Indian dipped his face into both of his hands and wailed, his shoulders trembling. Bass understood loss. Goda’mighty, did he ever understand loss. Quickly he folded his old friend into his arms and let the warrior quake against his shoulder.
“You been hidin’ since they took her?”
Stepping back, the Shoshone snorted and said with his hands, “Eight days now. This eighth day. They take her. I follow on foot. Blackfeet take my woman, my horses. They take everything else.”
And Scratch understood how it felt to have the Blackfoot swoop down and ride off with a man’s wife. How it felt to have the Mormons sashay off with everything he had accumulated in his life of wading crotch-deep into streams or punching all the way into California to steal some Mexican horses. Bass understood how a man could feel everything being jerked out from under him by forces he could not comprehend, much less control.
“The gun I give you?” Titus asked, hopeful.
Pointing back at the brush where he had been hiding, the Shoshone said, “I have the gun still. Balls and powder too. I go hunting.”
“Man’s gotta eat.”
But Slays shook his head. “I go hunting for Blackfeet. Eight days, I follow their horses down the river.”
“Was you gone when them Blackfoot come through?”
“Hunting antelope with my friend’s gun,” he replied with his hands. “I come back, see them riding away. Big, big war party. Dressed like Blackfeet. My lodge is empty. Horses gone. But I still have my gun, and my legs, and a small piece of buffalo robe—so I start following their trail down the Bighorn for the Elk River into Crow country.”
Scratch looked into the eyes of his wife. She nodded slightly to tell him she had understood the import of the Shoshone’s sign language. Then he glanced at Flea.
“Son, take the packs off that red horse there,” Titus instructed in Crow. “Spread those packs among the other three horses. Our friend can ride the red horse.”
