“Gway.”
“Close enough,” she told him. “I will call you nadainape.”
He knew that word, it was what Red Rain called Cracked Bone Thrower and what Puhagan’s wife Flowering Sage called him. The Dukurika used it suspiciously like Americans used “husband.”
“And if I have to leave? Would you want to come with me? Go with me back to America?”
“I don’t know,” she both said and signed with her hands.
Cracked Bone Thrower shook his head. “She would not like the white world. I myself tried it when I was younger. You know that among the Dukurika, a man is expected to marry his wife’s sister. If your puha says you must leave, she will become my second wife.”
“Just like that?” Butler asked, amazed.
Mountain Flicker shot him a shy smile. “We are not white men, Butler. We are newe Dukurika. If you become part of our naatea, call me gwee, you will take responsibility for Red Rain, as well. If anything should happen to Dick Hamilton”—she smiled as she teased Cracked Bone Thrower with his white name—“you will call my sister gwee, wife, and care for her as well as share her bed.”
“What’re y’all gonna do now, Cap’n?” Kershaw asked dryly behind Butler’s ear.
“Do you really want this?” he asked Mountain Flicker.
Her smile widened. “You are a puzzle. Filled with puha, you see the dead. You faced Pa’waip and she gifted you. These things scare me, but you are a kind man who works hard. You help with the hunting and packing, and make me laugh. You have known pain and terrible things, but they have not made you bitter. I think you would make a good father for my children.”
“Father?” Butler asked himself softly, somewhat stunned.
He looked into her thoughtful dark eyes, his heart pounding. She wasn’t fooling. None of them were. He was being asked to join their family. He wasn’t a lunatic in their eyes. Not some piece of broken human being to be kicked, shunned, pitied, or humiliated. They wanted him because of who he was. Because he was crazy!
He reached out, drew her to him, and hugged her. Kissing the top of her red-lined head. “I would be delighted to call you gwee. I will cherish it every time you call me nadainape.”
To Cracked Bone Thrower, he said, “You, I will call babi, my older brother. And Red Rain, you are gwee to me.”
That night after the lodge had been made ready, and the last trips had been made outside for relief and to check the dogs and horses, Flicker knelt in the dying light of the fire and slipped her beautiful dress off.
Butler had already undressed and crawled under the robes. His hands were trembling; his heart beat in anticipation and terror as she slipped in beside him. He’d never felt a woman’s body against his, and for a moment, she just lay there, as if savoring the feeling herself.
Then she leaned her lips to his ear and whispered, “Nadainape.”
“I have never done this before,” he whispered.
“Me, either,” she whispered back.
She took his trembling hand, placed it between her breasts so that he could feel her pounding heart. Then, sighing, she led him in an exploration of her body.
They didn’t sleep much that night. Butler was too delighted with the soft sounds of pleasure that Mountain Flicker made deep down in her throat.
101
February 28, 1868
The wind couldn’t have cut more keenly if it were a knife. Backed by small flakes of blowing snow, it sliced through Billy’s coat, finding every small crack and gap. Locomotive, powerful beast that he was, nevertheless showed signs of fatigue. The packhorse following behind kept stumbling, jerking on the lead rope every time he did.
Billy knotted the muscles in his leg, arm, and side on the left. Then he’d tense his right in a futile effort to keep warm. By constant exercise he built heat, but it sapped his energy, and his stomach felt like a chafing and empty hole. Every muscle had gone stiff, as if it were made of wood.
He kept Locomotive moving on the rocky road, the horse’s hooves clacking on the worn river cobblestones, the cleat-tipped winter shoes slipping on ice. On his right, just past the line of winter-stark cottonwoods, the Missouri River’s course was marked by a broken, piled, and snow-covered swath of ice. The wind-torn bottom country almost looked smoky, an illusion created by the gray cottonwoods and their interlaced branches. Snow streaked the upland bluffs to the east where it had filled in drainages and cuts; the sides of the slopes drifted in rounded and sculpted mounds behind bare, windblown patches of sage.
The trail turned toward the river, and squinting against the bitter wind, Billy could see the ferry at Eldorado Bar. It was drawn up on the far side, choked with ice; the little shack just opposite it looked snug with a streamer of smoke curling out of the stovepipe to be wicked away by the wind.
Picking his way along the bank, floundering through drifted drainages, he kept staring longingly at the river. Back at the Great Falls, they’d no doubt found the body. One more in a long list. A man Billy hadn’t known. Just a name on a telegram. A poor bastard that somehow stood in George Nichols’s way. Already frozen, the corpse would have been hauled off to a shed to await the spring thaw and burial. They would be speculating about the meadowlark feather in the corpse’s pocket. That storekeeper’s wife would have told them about the young man in the slouch hat that rode the big black horse.
She might have even gotten a good enough look at Billy to draw a likeness of him. Though none of them would know his name.
He stopped Locomotive, feeling the big black tremble as he looked out over the broad Missouri. Here the ice was smooth, not cracked and piled, as if the river ran slower.
He fought a bout of shivering.
“Goddamn it!”
He couldn’t stay out—not given the bruise-dark band of clouds rolling
