like a force of its own and would carry him on for as long as it took.
Bass’s face hardened as he started to sob once more, slowly rocking his wife in his arms, groaning in a feral way like some wild thing caught and with but one way out of a trap. Except—this time he knew it was different. This time he would be required to sacrifice more than a paw imprisoned in the jaws. Gazing down at her face, he sensed those glazed eyes still somehow looked into his … then Titus reached up with his bloody fingertips and gently closed her eyelids.
The coming of the sun set the cold ground mist to steaming.
This first day of the rest of his life without her had begun.
They weren’t hard to track, not these brazen Blackfoot, these remnants of a once-unstoppable force in this northern world. Decimated by pox many, many winters ago, the tribe was now but a shell of its former greatness.
Perhaps that was why they had raided into Shoshone country, then swept back through the land of the Crow—attempting to recapture some semblance of their days of glory.
Titus had to laugh at that. There was no goddamned way any of them could recapture their glory days. Red or white. Nothing was left for the old warriors but to die. Either die quiet in their robes, sucking desperately at a last breath as they lay inside a lodge … or to die as a warrior. Out in the open, among the rocks, out under the sky.
We who are warriors—
Remembering how Whistler, Waits’s father, had died, how Whistler’s son, Strikes In Camp, had died too. Brave men who had unflinchingly stared death in the face at that final moment and not been found wanting. Surely there must be some sort of reward for such men, surely there must be something more for each of us—he found himself brooding again and again over the three days following the attack on the village. Three days of chasing, riding, stopping only to water the horses, then chasing some more until a short halt was called because it was too damned black to dare moving on till dawn.
Slays in the Night and the others slept in fits and starts on the cold ground, wrapped in a blanket or a piece of buffalo robe. But not him. There was nothing more he needed—not sleep, and surely not food. No hungers now … only to get his fingers around the windpipe of the one who had killed her. Titus knew he would remember that face, remember the pattern of the man’s war paint, for as long as this chase took. Something like that was burned into the back of his head like a red-hot iron brand would scour its imprint into a piece of smoldering wood. He saw the face, the paint, the warrior’s clothing every time he merely closed his eyes in weariness. The image was emblazoned behind his eyelids, refusing to release him.
So much the better, Bass thought. It would draw him on until he found the man.
The raiders had at least half a day on their pursuers, time that the camp of Pretty On Top gave over to caring for the wounded and the dead, reaching some count of the stolen horses, calling together the chiefs and headmen of the warrior societies.
“It does not matter how much you argue on who is to go and who is to stay,” Scratch had snapped at these younger men. “It matters little what plans you feel you must make to pursue these enemies. Every word you waste is one more step they take away from Absaroka. Every heartbeat we stand here is one more it will take until we taste the blood of these murderers.”
Quietly, Pretty On Top said, “You are not the only man here to suffer a loss—”
“Then the rest of you who have lost someone you love can do what you want,” he interrupted and shrugged off those war leaders with a wave of his arm. “There is talk … and there is action. I am putting my feet on this last warpath now.”
Titus had turned away and started back toward Magpie’s lodge, his son and his Shoshone friend caught by surprise but quickly catching up to him, one at each elbow. Of a sudden, Turns Back had lunged ahead of him, stopping right in front of the old white man.
“Uncle,” he said to his father-in-law with respect. “I will go with you. With the three of you. She was my wife’s mother. I will go with you—”
“No,” Titus growled as he shoved his flat palm against the young man’s chest. “You stay here with Flea. I don’t want—”
“Stay here?” Flea echoed as he circled around to stand in front of his father, towering over the white man.
Titus looked up at the angry eyes of his son. “You have a brother and a sister to watch over.”
Shaking his head furiously, Flea protested, “My sister, she can care for them while we are gone.”
“Magpie has a family of her own,” Titus scolded his son. “Jackrabbit and Crane, they are your family now, Flea. Your only family.”
“My wife, she can watch her brother and sister,” Turns Back said. “Flea will go with us—”
“No—you two must stay and protect them,” Titus refused with a resolute wag of his head. “Someone brave must stay behind and watch over these lives that mean so much to me.”
Flea drew himself up and looked down at his father. “Turns Back can stay and watch over them all until we come back to bury my mother—”
“No, son—you will do that today. Yourself. The last act of love for your mother,” Titus explained.
“Then I will do it before we go,” Flea said desperately. “So that my mother will be buried before—”
“Don’t you understand, my son?” he snapped at the young man. “My feet have already begun a journey from which there is no return.”
Titus started to step between them, but Flea caught him, held his father tightly by both of the old man’s arms.
“Y-you are not coming back, Father?”
He first looked into the eyes of Turns Back, then at his son’s face, seeing how the eyes started to pool. “When you watch my back disappear through the trees, you will then be the leader of this family—the protector of your brother and sister.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“No … because you are now the one called Holds the Fight,” Titus said, watching the new name register on his son’s face.
“H-holds the Fight?”
“You need a new name, son,” he said, the hard lines of his face softening. “Flea was a good name for a boy … but now you truly are a man. A man who has a family to hunt and provide for, a family he must protect. A father is the one to name his children … when the First Maker finally tells that father what to name the child. Just now I have heard our Creator tell me that you are Holds the Fight—because you will stay behind to protect your family.”
With deep respect Turns Back quietly repeated the name, “Holds the Fight,” then put his arm across his young brother-in-law’s shoulders, struggling to speak as he held back the tears. “Yes, old warrior—the two of us will do as you have asked. Even though it will be painful to watch you ride off after these enemies without us at your side, we will honor She Who Is No Longer Here by obeying your last wishes.”
“And we will honor you, Father,” Holds the Fight added, his chin quivering even as he stood taller than the older men. Quickly he unbuckled the narrow belt he had around his waist, that belt he had worn from the day Jim Bridger had given it to him when he was a gangly youngster that first summer at the post on Black’s Fork. From the long strap he dragged the beaded rawhide sheath and knife. “Take this knife with you, Father. Use it to cut the scalp from the one who killed my mother.”
For a moment he stared down at the weapon held out between them, wanting to refuse his son’s request. Then he took the scabbard into his hand and peered into the young man’s eyes.
“If I return with the scalp, I will bring back your knife,” he said in a whisper, his throat clogging with emotion. “But if I do not return … remember me always to my youngest children. Raise them to honor the memory of their father.”
Holds the Fight lunged against him, encircling his father with his long arms, and they sobbed together for a moment before they tore themselves apart. Titus touched his heart with his empty right hand, then placed those fingertips against his son’s breast.
“Let the memory of me always rise in your heart like the coming of the sun,” he croaked painfully. “It is
