You go on with your brother. Help your mother and Shell Woman pack for the trail.”
“Scratch, I … I didn’t mean nothin’ by what I said just now,” the tall man apologized. “’Bout it bein’ what a man does with Injuns.”
“You got a daughter of your own gonna grow up one of these days, Shadrach.”
Sweete nodded as he turned his head this way and that, peering into the darkness. “I thought of that too. Thought how I’d feel if’n she was Magpie.”
“Maybeso it’s that way with most Injuns: sell off their daughters to the nigger can put up the biggest cache of goods,” Bass said as he jerked Bordeau to a halt near the lodge, where excited voices murmured and noises clattered.
“I s’pose white folk do it back east too, most times,” Shadrach observed. “Folks fix up a marryin’ for their daughters to the richest feller they can.”
“I ain’t back east, Shadrach. Left that all behind a hull lifetime ago,” he said, his voice almost a hush now. “An’ I ain’t like no Injun neither. Never gonna sell Magpie off for a stack of trade goods.”
“So where do fellas like us go, Scratch?” he asked. “Now that this country ain’t the same as it was an’ ever’thing’s changed on us?”
“We keep running till we get to the next place, Shadrach,” he admitted. “We can give up to their kind and give in to all the ruin they’re bringin’ to the mountains … or we keep runnin’ till we drop in our tracks. Man does one or the other. Let the ruin eat ’im up alive, or he does his best to stay one jump ahead.”
Much to Bass’s surprise, none of the French
Between the two women and Magpie, the bedding was tied up and the lodge torn down, all of it thrown on the travois and packhorses while Flea untied the dogs and helped Shadrach get Bordeau trussed up for his ride with a length of hemp rope. It wasn’t until they were mounted and on their way out of the valley that Waits-by-the- Water finally began to sob, quietly.
“No bad come to her,” Titus reassured in English.
Yet she said in Crow, “This time. What of the next? Will you be there? Will there be too many for you?”
“She’s a pretty girl,” he whispered, trying to explain it. “Bees will always flit around the honey.”
With a long, stern glare at her husband, Waits said, “You don’t understand. Other white men, they are not like you. Not like our friend Sweete. The other pale eyes, they will always buy what they can, and steal everything else.”
Wagging his head, Titus argued in her tongue, “It isn’t just white men. For generations and generations, your people raided for ponies and scalps, taking women and children too. It isn’t only white men who steal what they want.”
She sighed, her eyes getting even more sad. “Then where will we go to protect our daughter until she chooses a man of her own—the way I chose you,
He studied her face in the dark for a long time until he answered, “I haven’t sorted that out just yet.”
“I love you, husband. I always will,” she promised. “But, more and more now, I am thinking that it was not a good day when the white man first came among my people.”
“I am wounded by your words—”
“I did not speak their truth to hurt you,” she said. “It is the other men of your white tribe who are evil and leave pain wherever they go. I know you are not like the rest of them. And, I know that this troubles you too.”
“There was a time not so long ago when I understood this world,” he told her as they rode into the dark. “I knew what to make of things. I could tell a friend from those who meant me no goodwill. But now my old life is gone like winter breathsmoke in a hard wind. I do not know people anymore, Indian or white. Perhaps you are right, woman: it is my people who have brought a great change to this land—but your red people have changed as well, changed over the summers since I left the land of the white man behind.”
She nodded and stared ahead into the night. “I know your words. While it is true that your kind brought the first shift in our way of life, many of the red people made wrong choices and became bad like those whites who came among us. Those like you and me are few—people caught between two worlds. I feel a danger growing around us like a thick fog. Where can our kind go to be safe again?”
“I don’t know where we ever will find us a place that will be safe from those who would crush in around this land—stealing what belongs to us, running off with those we love,” he sighed. “Those who are ruining everything we ever knew to be true.”
They had put trouble behind them before, but the trouble they were running from in Taos, or here along the North Platte, was unlike anything Bass had confronted before. This was not something that could be solved by simply escaping. Down to his toes, he was frightened that they would eventually discover they weren’t able to run from what he feared was coming, that the evil of it was growing more vast as they relentlessly put the miles and days behind them.
From that very night, Shadrach and his family took the lead, setting a course up the north bank of the La Ramee River, striking south by west instead of following the well-beaten road along the Platte that made for the Sweetwater and the Southern Pass. They realized they stood a much better chance of escape if they stayed off that hoof-hammered trail used by trappers and trading caravans. Riding south around the Black Hills would prove much harder on the women and the animals, but it would likely deter any halfhearted pursuit.
As twilight put a close to each of those early days of flight, they would stop and build a fire, cook a little meat, and warm some coffee before moving on another handful of miles, where they would picket the horses and shake out their sleeping robes. Without the warmth of a fire, the only illumination shed on that high, barren land was cast down by the stars—if the sky hadn’t clouded up and gone murky with the probability of rain. During their first stop each evening, Shadrach or Scratch would bring Bordeau the scraps after the rest had eaten their fill.
“You didn’t give ’im much,” Sweete commented after their first full night on the trail and the women had boiled some dried strips of elk shot the day before they had reached Fort William.
“Fat as he is, bastard won’t starve afore we set him out on his own,” Titus said without the slightest hint of mercy. “Stiff-necked parley-voo gonna have to use his wits to get back to the Platte. If’n he don’t—well, now … I hope what takes him down makes it slow an’ painful.”
Their third night of flight, low along the fringes of thick timber at the southern end of those low mountains, where they had been following the climb of the La Ramee, they were suddenly caught by a late snowstorm and ended up spending three days and nights around a fire, until the winds died and the sky cleared. Through it all, Shad and Titus spelled each other, one of them awake at all times, watchful for pursuers. By the time the heavens blued again, Scratch had grown certain the
“Gonna send you back to the teat of your awmighty American Fur Company, Mon-sur Bordeau,” Titus said one midday when they had stopped to water the horses at a small spring nearly hidden by a vast carpet of yellow- green juniper.
The Frenchman brought his dripping face out of the cold water. “Y-you set me free?”
“That’s right,” and Titus started working at the knots around the Frenchman’s wrists.
“I have nothing,” Bordeau whined. “You must give me a horse! A blanket and a gun too. Powder and shot. To stay alive—”
Yanking the rope from the trader’s wrists, Scratch took a step back. “Told you when we left Fort William: You ain’t wuth a red piss, much less one o’ my horses. I need ’em all—so you’re on your feet now.”
“These boots!” he whimpered. “They won’t last in this mud! Wh-what if it snows again!”
Sweete stepped up. “Give ’im a blanket, Scratch.”
He nodded at Shadrach. “My friend says to give you a blanket, keep you from freezing. And, I’ll let you have one of these here belt guns I took off the niggers was running off with my daughter.”
