“Said to name you Magpie. ’Cause you loved to talk, even before we could understand your talk. ’Nother thing He tol’t me was your mother could smoke with me that night we called you Magpie for the first time.”
“Women never smoke,” Flea argued, his young face gray with seriousness.
“Your mother belonged to our lodge, son. I am leader of that lodge—the coyote band. I told her she could smoke to pray for our first young’un.”
“You smoke and pray for me too?” the boy asked, turning to his mother.
“We have done the same for you and Jackrabbit,” she answered in Crow. “Go get your little brother before he gets too close to the riverbank.”
Scrambling up as he grumbled in complaint, Flea took after the fleet-footed Jackrabbit. That’s when Scratch took an opportunity to whisper to his daughter.
“You wanted to smoke my pipe the night we named you.”
She grinned at that. “So you let me smoke soon, like my mother?”
“No,” he shook his head. “Not for women like it is for men. That smoke your mother had for each of her young’uns was real holy.”
“I do not know this word,
In Crow Bass explained, “Do you understand
“Yes, now I see the meaning.”
“You was all arms and legs that night, wriggling and squealing, when we took off all your clothes—so you was naked as the day you was born. Then I held you up to the sky, so First Maker could get Him a real good look at the beautiful creature He’d made through your mother an’ me.”
“Will this be my name for all time?”
He hugged her a little more tightly. “Your mother an’ me have you with us for only a short time. One day, you’ll belong to another—”
“But I don’t wanna leave you!” she sobbed in Crow against his chest.
Rubbing the first spill of tears from a cheek, Scratch said, “One day soon you will be ready to leave us, and go with a man. The two of you gonna make a family of your own. You won’t be with our family no more.”
“No, Popo! I don’t want to leave!”
“Daughter,” he said, his throat clogged with emotion, “it is the way of the Creator. You’re with us for just a short while, riding the trails we take. Then comes a season an’ you’ll go off on your own trail. A time when we both will cry for your leavin’.”
“I don’t want that for a long, long time,” the girl sobbed, pressing her face into the hollow of his neck.
“An’ one day, a long, long time from now—the First Maker will call you back to be with Him again, Magpie. He’ll lift your spirit back up there with all the rest of them stars so you can be with Him again—just like you was afore you come to live with us for a little while.”
As Magpie turned her damp face upward to look at the sky, Titus glanced at his wife, finding her smiling at him, just as she had that night thirteen summers before, her cheeks glistening with moisture that spilled from her radiant black-cherry eyes. Just the way she had cried when they had given their daughter her name here beneath these same stars, beside these same waters. He was reminded how much had happened to him, happened to them all, in those intervening seasons. Then he was struck with how this place had remained unchanged—these bluffs and the rising half-moon, the rocks and the water. It all was timeless, perhaps infinite, while he himself was a mere mortal who came, and lived, then passed on in the mere blink of an eye compared to the everlasting earth and sky.
“Magpie.” The girl whispered her own name, gazing again at her father’s teary eyes.
He turned to his daughter, seeing how Magpie’s cheeks were completely streaked with riyulets of tears, her eyes pooling like her mother’s. “Yes, Magpie,” he repeated. “The li’l talking one who came to stay with her mother an’ me for a while.”
She flung her arms tightly around his neck and whispered in his ear, “I will stay with you and Mother forever.”
Titus felt his own eyes filling to overflowing as his tears began to spill atop his daughter’s head. “Yes, you will stay in our hearts for all time, Magpie. Forever, and for all time.”
The sun was nearing midsky two days later when Bass was surprised to spot a small log hut topped with a sod-and-timber roof. A thin spiral of smoke whispered from the top of a crude rock chimney. At the opposite corner of the cabin stood a small corral constructed of lodgepole pine.
He whistled up the dogs. Both Digger and Ghost came bounding up. He gave them a quick signal with his hand and they immediately heeled on his horse, tongues lolling, tails wagging … waiting.
Whoever it was raised this cabin, he thought as he emerged from the cottonwood, they had invested a lot of time and sweat to drag lodgepole all the way here from the Wind Rivers.
“Halloo, the house!” he sang.
A shadowy figure moved across the open doorway, just touched by the edge of sunlight. At the same moment a brown-skinned face appeared very briefly at the lone, tiny window, open and without benefit of glass. Poor doin’s, Titus ruminated.
“Titus? Titus Bass?” a voice cried out in English as the horseman warily approached. “Is that your ol’ gray head I’m seein’ after all these years?”
Scratch reined up, curious as to who might possibly know him here in the middle of the overland trail. From the appearance of the hut and that tiny corral penning up but three bone-rack horses, this damn well couldn’t be Bridger’s post. This was no more than a poor man’s shanty.
He squinted into the darkened doorway. “That’s me, Titus Bass,” he responded, leaning over his big pommel the size of a Mexican orange. “Say, friend, step on out here where I can see you too.”
The figure took but a moment to prop his rifle inside the doorway before he ventured two steps into the spring light, shading his eyes as he gazed up at Bass, when he suddenly caught sight of the others some sixty yards back.
“Uncle Jack? That really you, coon?”
Jack Robinson* tore his eyes off the others and held his hand up to the horseman. “Damn, Titus Bass. I ain’t see’d you since afore beaver went belly-up!” He gazed a moment at their joined hands. “It really you—not no ghost of your own self?”
Releasing his hand from the younger man’s grip, Bass slipped to the ground. “Flesh an’ blood, Uncle Jack. Damn, but I could say the same for you. Thort you’d gone belly-up yourself, or run off to Oregon country.”
The skinny Robinson shook his head, the loose wattles of his fleshy neck shaking like a turkey gobbler’s. “Here’s as pretty a piece of country as I’d ever wanna lay tracks in, Titus Bass. Think I’ll for sure stay in these parts till it’s time for my bones to lay in the wind.”
Scratch waved the others on. “I see’d a brown face in the window there. You got yourself a woman for company?”
Robinson glanced at the hut, putting his fingers between his teeth, and whistled. “My second. This’un’s a Snake. One of Washakie’s nieces. A real black-skinned bitch, but she’s got her a good heart. Warm place to keep my pecker in the winter too.”
“Can’t beat a robe-warmer in this high country,” Titus agreed.
Shading his face again, Robinson squinted at the pair of bounding dogs, then peered at those oncoming riders. “Looks like you got you a new squaw, Titus Bass.”
“Naw, that’s Shad Sweete’s woman. Cheyenne, she be, from down near Bents’ big lodge on the Arkansas.”
“Sweete’s his name?”
Titus nodded as the others got closer and started halting to dismount while Flea circled up their extra horses.
Robinson took a step closer to Bass. “That’un serve with Bridger any?”
“Him an’ Gabe was real tight of a time,” Bass explained as he led his horse over to the corral and tied off the reins to the top rail. “How far’s Bridger’s post from you?”
Uncle Jack pointed off to the southwest. “Should be there afore supper.” He watched Sweete start toward them. “I was the nigger told Bridger he ought’n build his post here on the Black’s Fork.” He turned to face Shadrach,
