The leader made a simple gesture, and his four companions came up to stand around the old man. They reached out with their tiny, hairy hands. Without warning, two of them slapped him on the soles of his feet, hard. One of the others gently laid his hands over the gaping belly wound, and the fourth spread his fingers over the bullet hole in his chest.
“Now—is there any pain?”
He shook his head, struck with wonder, bewildered by the magic. The immense, bone-numbing cold was still there, so icy he had never experienced anything close to it. But … no more did he suffer the pain.
“Then we have done all we can for you, old friend,” the leader said softly as his four companions stepped behind him. “Do you remember what your Blackfoot helper said before he left you to do the rest on your own?”
He remembered.
“Good. We are going away too. Now you must do what remains for yourself. Close your eyes and make your prayer.”
Without attempting to speak, he let his eyelids fall. And with his total being concentrated on struggling to draw one last, ragged, liquid breath deep within his shredded lungs. There it was! Such warmth that he wanted to sing out in victory, to cry out in joy. Lo, those many years, the countless seasons he had taken for granted this simple act of breathing. And only now, at the end, learning that the First Maker, his Creator who had given him his first breath as a newborn, was now asking him to utter one last prayer with his final breath.
“Pray for what is most dear in your heart, Wind Walker.”
The young Blackfoot’s words rang in his head.
And he felt that warmth from his chest rising into his throat, at the back of his tongue, one last gush of immense joy and gratitude for all that had been given him in his life, feeling the hot tears seeping between his eyelids he had clenched against the snowy, icy blasts of cold … that final prayer entered the whistle. Shrill and high.
An eagle’s cry of victory as it leaped from the wingbone, into the air, rising … rising … rising through the terrible cold … far, far higher still.
For the longest time he sat there, the tears frozen on his cheeks, conscious of how the cold was gradually diminishing. Knowing that if he weren’t already dead, he soon would be. After all, Titus reasoned, he no longer sensed the bone-jarring temperature, nor the insistent tug of the wind at his hair and flesh. Even the rock-hard trunk of the tree he leaned against no longer mattered—
Then, just when he wasn’t so sure what had happened to him, Scratch sensed what felt like warm breath against his face, heard the gentle call of a Steller’s jay as it rose in flight—so clear and distinct he could hear every flap of its wings.
Afraid his eyes would be frozen shut, Bass slowly opened them, but no more than slits because of the bright light illuminating the meadow before him. No winter scene … instead, what he saw was a sunlight benediction rained down upon a green, grassy beaver meadow ringed by jack pine and aspen, fragrant cedar and aromatic sage. Shadows dappled the far edge of that glen where sunlight shot through the leafy branches in a complex tapestry of color … enough to convince him it was no longer winter. He wasn’t cold anymore. And suddenly he realized he wasn’t alone.
At first he thought it was the Little People who had come to take away the pain from his dying, perhaps they who had created this dream for him. Because, he remembered with a sudden reckoning, that dream was in fact reality all along. If he had taken all those years in these high and majestic places to learn anything … it was that most simple fact that his dreams would always be more real than anything he had ever experienced.
Wanting to speak, Titus pushed his tongue against the wingbone whistle. But his lips were so dry they had fused together. So he reached up and gently pulled the whistle free. Licked his lips, and let the whistle lay against his chest. That’s when he looked down and noticed the blood. He’d been wounded many times before—knives and lead balls and arrows too—but never before had he seen so much of his own blood. Wallowing in it by the time the young Blackfoot got him dragged up this slope, to this shady stand of trees overlooking the beaver meadow …
But, while the blood still soaked his shirt and leggings, brownish, blackened stains smeared up and down the middle of him, when he slowly raised his two arms away from his belly to inspect himself, there was no wound, no coil of torn and twisted gut. Bewildered, he moved the whistle aside and stared down at the chest wound. A blood- ringed hole in the middle of his buckskin shirt. But when he gently probed with a finger through that hole, he encountered no wound.
The Little People could tell him. There they were! Across the meadow in the streaks of sunlight and shadow streaming through those beckoning quakies. A beaver gave a warning slap with its tail, then slipped beneath the placid surface of the pond reflecting the aching blue of the sky overhead.
“I hear you!” he said, surprising himself with how strong his voice had become after being so weak, feeling so drained, so damned empty for so long. “C’mon out—I got a few more questions for you—”
But he cut off his call in midsentence as the shadow became figure and stepped into the edge of the light, moved down the emerald bank, and came to a stop at the grassy edge of the uncluttered pond.
“Titus!”
“Y-yes,” he answered, his throat seizing in wonder as he recognized the man from the distant past. “That r- really you?”
“Cap’n Ebenezer Zane!” the man cried out, standing every bit as tall and bold as that day back in 1810 when he had waved aboard a gangly young lad from the Kentucky shore of the Ohio River, inviting him onto a flatboat loaded with goods bound for New Orleans, beckoning him to take that first leap into a lifetime of adventures where there would be no looking back.
“H-how you here … ?”
“Don’t you worry none ’bout that now, young Titus,” Zane called. “I was sent to bring you along, son. It’s your time now … time to come with us.”
“Us?”
Zane turned slightly, took a step back to the line of quakies that whispered, quietly rattling with the warm breeze that barely ruffled the surface of the beaver pond. The old flatboat pilot made one simple gesture with his wrist.
Another tree’s shadow blurred, taking shape as it inched into the sunlight. Striding down the hill to join Zane came Isaac Washburn, straight as a ramrod and fit as a freshly oiled square-jawed beaver trap.
“Hyar, ye boy! I see’d you made it to them Shinin’ Mountains I tol’t you of!” he called out with a wave across the meadow.
Titus rolled onto his hip, not sure if he could believe both of them being here. “I-I done it ’cause of what you told me, Gut,” he said, his voice catching as he used the old mountaineer’s handle. And felt the first of the warm tears begin to pool in his eyes.
“Nawww,” Washburn protested with a bright smile that lit up his teeth the color of pin acorns, “you done it for your own self, Titus Bass. The way you was meant to all along.”
He cleared the lump in his throat and called across the meadow, “You both come to fetch me, did you?”
“Me too,” a new voice called as the shadow pulled itself away from the stand of aspen.
For a moment Titus sat right there, frozen and unable to move as he stared at Jack Hatcher, who stomped up between Washburn and Zane, looking hale and hearty and every bit as fit as that newly strung fiddle he raised up to the hollow of his shoulder.
“I come along to play us some of the ol’ songs, Scratch,” he cried out. “Ever’ journey must have its music, ol’t friend!”
“Never was much of a singer,” Titus admitted as he started to rise to his feet.
“Neither was I,” the new figure announced as it stepped into the meadow, hair the brilliant white of a newly born cloud. “But there was many a time I wished I could have sung, my heart was so filled with joy to find a friend like you.”
“Asa? Jehoshaphat, if that ain’t really you!”
McAfferty came up beside Hatcher, pounded Jack on the shoulder with his one hand, and said, “Maybe now’s the time you play a li’l music for this’un been a long, long time gettin’ into camp.”
Drawing his ratty bow across the strings, Jack kicked off a light and merry tune, something Scratch knew he should recognize from long, long ago.
“If you won’t sing,” a new accent cried out as the shadow tore itself away from the copse of trees, “I sure
