Death Rattle (51 page)

As the dim light swelled into the pewter glow of a snowy dawn, Titus decided that he didn’t have to sort it out today. He could wait, thereby giving the right answer time to stew and cook, then bubble to the surface in its own good time. Sometimes weighty matters were best left to the closest deliberation he was known to ever give anything of concern.

He’d think on it now and again while the day passed. Which meant one more day he was forced to put off his search for the Crow of Yellow Belly.

At midmorning when the wind died a little, Titus awoke with a start and clambered to his feet. As soon as the white man made noise, the youngster snapped awake, awkwardly pushing himself back into a sitting position, glaring anew at his enemy.

And that was just how Scratch felt as he stepped around the opposite side of the fire pit, watching the boy’s eyes. These Blackfoot had long been his enemy. How many of them had he killed over the seasons?
Maybeso he’d have to scratch at that knotty problem sometime tonight after dark. For now, he bent and grabbed one of the stiffening corpses by the back of the warrior’s collar. Raised him up and dragged the dead man out of the copse of trees through the snow that had fallen deep enough to fill most of the hoofprints and moccasin tracks around his camp.

He returned for the second attacker, dropping the contorted body next to the first, downwind and next to a three-foot-high snowdrift. As he stepped back into the trees he watched the youngster’s eyes and stopped in his tracks. Something different there now—no longer the unmitigated hatred. Titus wondered if he was a damn fool to think the boy’s eyes might be softening, almost pleading with him.

That third body was the boy’s blood. Family. Kinfolk. While Titus had given up on his own people, had abandoned his cold and distant parents, his sister and brothers back in Boone County, he had come to possess some strong notion of just what family could mean to a body. Over time, his woman and their young’uns—they had come to be the family he had long wanted to hold close, the family he felt he deserved.

The boy began growling again, a wild, raspy sound at the back of his throat when Bass stopped at the third corpse and bent over to grab hold of the half frozen carcass.

This time Scratch did not turn around in his tracks and trudge out of the trees. Instead, he took the dozen steps that brought him to the youngster’s shoulder, where he gently, slowly laid the cold body beside the boy’s hip. The youngster’s eyes followed the white man as he stepped away to some of his baggage, dusted off some snow with the side of his woolen mitten, then threw back the oiled sheeting and began to unknot a pile of red blankets. More than likely, red would be of special significance.

Dragging the Russian sheeting back over the blankets and trade goods to protect them from the unrelenting snowfall, Bass trudged over to the youngster whose eyes never once left the trapper as he went and came. The
black orbs were growing with wonder at what the old man was up to—if not downright consternation—by the time Titus stopped by the corpse, grabbed an edge of the blanket, and unfurled it in the frosty air.

When he had it draped over the body, completely covering the warrior from his greased and feathered topknot to the soles of his buffalo-hide winter moccasins, Bass straightened once more and dusted snow from the knee of his legging.

“I know this’un means something to you,” he said as the youngster’s eyes eventually climbed to stare into his. “Far as I know, for most of your people—no matter what tribe you be—red’s the color for war. No better honor I can give this nigger what tried to kill me than to leave him on his back, facing the sky. And cover ’im with red—head to toe—the color of a warrior’s paint.”

He was relieved when the youngster ate something that next sunrise as the dawn swelled around them.

Throughout the first day, the boy had refused to eat, even turning his head away when Bass offered him a drink of water from a tin cup from time to time while they waited out the snowstorm.

“You get hungry ’nough, thirsty too—I wager you’ll let me know.”

Bass knelt now, offering him some hot coffee, but the youngster refused it, preferring melted snow in another cup. Then the boy’s black eyes landed on the meat Scratch had roasting over the flames as the sky grayed. Carefully carving a long, thin slice from the venison ham that sizzled and popped as it cooked, Titus carried it over to the boy.

Eagerly tilting his chin up, the Blackfoot accepted the offered meat, chewing ravenously as the white man let the long sliver of meat descend between the youth’s lips.

“Bet you want more of that.”

The youngster’s tongue flicked across his greasy mouth while his eyes danced back to that venison haunch
broiling over the fire. The boy damn well ate more than half of the whole leg that morning!

With the sun’s arrival at the edge of the earth, it was time to bring in the horses one by one. Across their backs he laid the thick wool saddle pads he had traded off Goddamn Murray, then cinched down each of the crude, wooden sawbucks before securing two heavy loads to the saddles, one on each side of the horse. Over the loads he diamond-hitched a drape of oiled sheeting that would protect his trade goods from even the most violent, wind-driven, horizontal rain.

But, he sighed after finishing the knots on the last of the dozen horses, there was little chance for any calamity like frozen rain this day. The sun was emerging bold and brassy in a cloudless blue sky. As far as the eye could see, the whole world was bathed in white, cleansed anew. Damn near as virginal as this land was the day after God made all these fine, fine sculpturings for the few men what lived in such sacred places as these.

Already the glare was growing intense. Here in the shadows of these big cottonwoods the sunlight wasn’t near so bad. But out there where he’d be spending the day in the saddle—that intense reflection off the snow would damn well blind him by afternoon. Winter sunlight was even more merciless than summer sun this far north.

His lips were already burnt, cracked and sore as they were. Titus had been breathing hard with the sort of exertion a younger man would’ve taken in stride. But, Titus Bass was no longer a young man. He was having to admit how his body was tiring of the constant struggle just to do what he had taken for granted a decade ago—much less what he was able to do those seventeen winters ago when he first came to these High Stonies. He couldn’t help the hard breathing, or having to take things a bit slower, or being forced to pace himself at every major task that came his way … but he could do something about the searing heat of his oozy lips.

Raising the flap on his shooting pouch, Scratch’s bare fingers located and pulled out the flat tin made of tarnished
German silver. Thumbing in the spring-loaded catch, he flipped back the hinged top before wiping two fingertips across the hard, milky grease he had rendered from bear fat early last spring before setting off for the Wind Rivers: a three-year-old black bear he had killed down in the breaks of the Bighorn as a change of diet for him and his family.

As he slowly worked the grease into his inflamed lips, Titus thought on how human that bear’s carcass had looked hanging there from a sturdy tree branch after he had skinned it. Damn near spooky. For days after he had ruminated on nearly every story the Yuta or Snake or Crow had to tell about their brother, the bear. Human or not, to have a look at one trussed up and skinned out sure could give even the most skeptical of men the willies.

Then he sank to one knee beside the fire pit where the last of the branches had burnt themselves down to glowing, flameless embers. After putting a small dollop of the bear grease into the palm of his left hand, Scratch scooped up some of the blackest char he could find at the side of the pit and crumbled a little of it onto the greasy palm. Pitching the rest of the blackened wood back into the pit, Titus used a single fingertip to mix charcoal and animal fat together until he had a thick, black paste.

Rising, he turned to face the youngster while smearing a gob of paste across the wrinkled, sagging skin beneath the one weathered, but good, eye. It would go a long way in preventing most of the glare he would suffer, since more than eighty-five percent of the sun’s intensity was reflected off that new, pristine snow they would be crossing in the day’s search.

They.

He wasn’t completely sure why, but sometime around twilight the night before, Bass had decided it would be
they
today. He couldn’t begin to reconcile leaving the boy behind, all tied up and left to the mercy of the weather, or critters either one. And if he let the Blackfoot go with a weapon, chances were the youngster might try to exact some revenge on Titus. Which meant he’d end up having to kill the boy. Then again, if Bass let the boy go without
a weapon, what chances would the Blackfoot have to make it back to his own people with no way to provide for himself on the journey? On and on he had argued with himself throughout the day … until deciding that his conscience could do nothing but put off making a decision until he had come to a solution he could live with.

A solution the youngster might come to live by.

Kneeling an arm’s length from the youngster now, Scratch swiped a greasy gob of the fire-black onto his fingertip, then reached out to smear it beneath the boy’s eye. With a menacing growl that reminded Scratch of a cornered dog, the Blackfoot jerked his head aside, his eyes filling with sudden fear.

“Why, you li’l son of a bitch,” Bass husked. “I’m doin’ this for your own good, dammit.”

Again he tried to get the fingertip near the boy’s eyes, but the Blackfoot snapped his head side to side. Titus scooted a little closer on his knee. With surprising swiftness he brought up his left hand, pressing the heel of his palm against the boy’s forehead, pinning the back of the youngster’s head against the tree with all his weight. Try as he might, the Blackfoot could only shriek and snap with his teeth at the hand that proceeded to paint the colored grease beneath both eyes—

Paint. Jehoshaphat! If that weren’t likely it!

He released his grip on the youngster’s brow and leaned back.

“Lookee here now,” and he pointed below his one good eye with that blackened fingertip. “This here’s what I’m doin’ to you. I ain’t painting you up for no mourning or grieving. Don’t you see, boy? This ain’t no war grieving I’m doing on you—so stop your damned caterwauling!”

A few more times he gestured with that black fingertip, pointing back and forth between his own eye and the youth’s eyes until the Blackfoot quit shrieking and the panic drained from the boy’s face. Scooting backward a couple of feet, Titus stabbed his bare hands into the snow, scooping up enough that he could use to wash his
fingers and that palm. Again and again he rubbed the snow over the greasy, blackened skin until he had scrubbed off about all he could, then swiped his palms down the grease-blackened, bloodstained, stiffened fronts of his leggings.

Titus stood to gaze down at the red blanket. “What you figger me to do with your blood kin?”

When the youngster turned and stared at the shrouded corpse for a long time without returning Bass’s gaze, Titus asked, “You don’t ’spect me to drag him along with us, now do you? Don’t you get that notion in your head—’cause I’d just as soon leave you here with ’im as have to drag his cold carcass with us next few days till we find them Crow.

“Then what?” Scratch continued by asking the big question. Maybe just the rising sound of his voice as he posed the problem made the youth look at him again. “So we take your kinfolk with us when we run onto the Crow. What you expect us to do when those Absorkees find out I’m dragging around a dead Blackfoot? They’re gonna chop your relation into some mighty small pieces right afore your eyes—an’ you’ll go to wailing again.”

He sighed, turned slowly around. And found himself studying the copse of trees. There. It wouldn’t take long. He could work with a rope, looping it over those two parallel branches—hoist the body up inside its red blanket and tie off the rope. Then he could shinny up that trunk and drag the body onto that pair of branches where he could tie it down in place. A good place for the body to rest, in one of those Bents Fort horse-trading blankets. A red funeral shroud for a warrior.

What in blue hell was he doing? He’d near been killed by these sonsabitches more times’n he had battle scars. So why was he even giving a second thought to burying this red nigger proper right here in the heart of Crow country?

“Shit,” he grumbled as he strode over to the cotton-wood where he angrily snapped off a few short limbs no bigger around than one of his fingers.

Quickly he used his camp knife to shave off the bark
from each one, making it smooth, then sharpened the end of each stick until he had a half dozen some eight or ten inches long. Not near as long as lacing pins that locked the two flaps of a lodge over its poles, but long enough for the job at hand.

Dropping the peeled twigs beside the dead warrior, Bass knelt and rolled the stiffened carcass over. Dragging back the red blanket, he studied the young man’s face, then peered into the boy’s eyes. No reasonable man could deny they were blood kin. Then he gave study to what the warrior carried on his belt. Bass freed the leather strap from the buckle and dragged it loose before he resecured the strap and buckle and laid the belt aside. Not until then did he notice the whistle that hung from a thong around the dead man’s neck. At first it had been tucked out of sight in the warrior’s armpit.