The old man sang his death song then;
His voice rang clear and high;
“O Sun, thou endureth forever,
But we who are warriors must die!”
—STANLEY VESTAL
ONE
“Strangers?”
Without looking at his young son, Titus Bass nodded and eventually whispered, “Yes, Flea. In this country, you must consider everyone a stranger.”
His own words stabbed into the frozen air, hung frostily for but a heartbeat, then were ripped away by a sharp, sudden gust that stirred up skiffs of the dry, two-day-old snow around them, where they lay on a ledge of bare rock.
“Get me the far-seeing glass,” the fifty-three-year-old trapper said, never tearing his eyes off the distant objects plodding like black-backed sow beetles across the everywhere-white ablaze beneath the brilliant winter sun in a far-reaching sky.
Without making a sound in reply, the boy of ten winters scooted backward into the stunted cedar, where he rose in a crouch and quietly padded away, the soft crunch of his thick winter moccasins fading in the utter, aching silence that made itself known each time the winter wind died here on the brow of the low ridge. It wasn’t long before Titus heard his son returning. Flea went to his knees, then plopped onto his belly to cover those last few yards, crawling right up beside his father, their elbows brushing.
“You are a good son,” he whispered to his oldest boy in the child’s strongest language, Crow—the tongue of Flea’s mother.
Brushing some of his long, gray hair out of his face, Titus again vowed that he should teach his children more, much more, of his own American tongue in the months and years to come. Down in the marrow of him he was growing more certain with time that they would need that American tongue before they became adults. His children would grow into maturity and give birth to children of their own in a world that Bass knew nothing of. A world very much unlike the world he had grown up in at the edge of the frontier, back there in Kentucky—essentially the same world his own father had grown up in, and to a great extent the very same life his grandfather had known before them. Right in the same place, on the same land both father and grandfather had tilled, sweated into, and prayed over. But … Magpie, Flea, and little Jackrabbit would soon enough confront a world their father knew nothing of.
He smiled as Flea held out the long, brass spyglass to him. “You are a good lad,” he said, this time in American, slowly too, pulling out the three sections to the spyglass’s full length.
“Lad.” Flea tried the word out, then paused slightly as he strung more words together, “I—am—a—good— lad.”
“You’re about the best lad ever could be,” Titus confirmed, again in American, then patted his son on the shoulder.
Poking his trigger finger through the small slot cut in his thick buffalo-hair mittens so he could fire his rifle with those mittens on, Bass swiveled the tiny brass protective plate away from the eyepiece and brought the spyglass to his one good eye. Blinked several times. Then peered through the long instrument as he slowly scanned the far ground below them until the image of the riders flashed across his view. Back he brought the spyglass, then slowly, slowly twisted the last of the three sections to bring the figures into better focus.
“Here, Flea—have a look for your own self,” he said as he handed the boy the spyglass. When his son had it against one eye, Bass spoke in Crow. “Turn it slow, like this, to see the riders come up close in your eye.”
The man rubbed the long, pale scar that angled downward from the outside corner of his left eye while he waited for the boy to scan the ground ahead with that strange, foreign instrument. He had worn that scar for some fifteen winters now, cut there in a last, desperate fight he had with an old friend whose right hand had been replaced with a crude iron hook.
As the youth panned across the landscape, Flea jerked to a halt and held the spyglass steady, breathless too.
Titus asked, “How many you count?”
Flea’s lips moved slightly as he continued to concentrate his attention on the distant objects. “Two-times- ten, perhaps a little more.”
“No, in American.”
The boy took the spyglass from his eye and concentrated now on this new problem. Then he said in his father’s tongue, “Ten.”
“No,” Titus prodded in a whisper, speaking his own native language. “That’s the wrong American word. Two- times-ten. So in American, you say
“Why is this number more important than those riders down there?” Flea asked with a youth’s irritation.
Bass sighed and said, “You are right. We must think on the riders. All those horsemen—do you think they are enemies?”
With a nod, the boy answered in Crow, “Just as you said, in this country there are many strangers … and strangers could be enemies.”
For a moment he glanced at Wah-to-Yah, the Spanish Peaks, rising against the blue winter sky off to the west. Then he asked the boy, “Tell me what you think about those riders. Do you see the horses that don’t carry any riders? The animals loaded down with packs? What of this bunch coming our way—should we hurry back to your mother and the rest of our family? Should we get them into hiding fast?”
For a long moment Flea regarded his father as if it might just be a trick question. Then he whispered, “They don’t ride like Indians.”
“Why do you say they don’t ride like Indians, son?”
“Because, Popo,” Flea said, using that affectionate name for his father, “the Indians I know—they ride in single file.”
“So these horsemen, what are they?”
“White men?”
“Say it in American for me.”
“White men,” Flea said assuredly. He knew those words. His father was one. Half his blood and bone and muscle was white.
“You see the dog?” he asked his son.
“Dog?”
“Look carefully—and you’ll spot him.”
After some moments, Flea finally declared, “That dog is white—I did not see him for a long time because of the snow.”
“Big dog, ain’t it?” he asked in American.
