Death Rattle (52 page)

But by tugging on the thin strap, Titus freed it, dragging the thong over the dead warrior’s head. Some six to seven inches long, it was clearly an eagle wingbone carved into a war whistle. Someone, maybe a family member, perhaps even the dead man’s lover or wife, had braided red, black, and yellow quills around the middle two thirds of the whistle.

He brought it to his lips, but just as he was about to blow the whistle, Scratch suddenly stopped. Aware that perhaps he shouldn’t out of respect for the enemy dead. For a moment, he returned the youngster’s quizzical gaze, then scooted over to drop the long leather loop over the boy’s head.

“I figger that’s rightly your’n, son. Maybeso, he’d wanted you to have it. It and this here belt with his fixin’s and knife too.”

Bass creaked to his feet, his knees grown stiff on the icy snow. “But I ain’t giving you that there belt and knife—not yet I ain’t.”

He dragged out his own knife and crouched over the dead warrior. Quickly tugging on the four sides of the red blanket, he pulled them together as tight as he could around the corpse. Then hole by hole, he punched the tip of his knife through the flaps of thick wool and inserted
the long, peeled pins that would hold the blanket in place as a crude funeral shroud.

With two of his short lariats looped over a high branch above that pair of parallel limbs, and the ends of both ropes knotted around the frozen corpse—one at the ankles and one around the shoulders—Scratch went to fetch his saddle horse. When he had the loose ends of both lariats secured around the large pommel, Bass grabbed the reins in one hand, gave the youngster a quick look, then spoke softly to the roan.

“C’mon—easy, easy now.”

As he tugged on the reins, the animal slowly inched forward, taking the slack out of the ropes, then eased the body off the ground where it began to swing a little, first in one direction, then to the other, twisting slowly, slowly in a half circle from its two ropes.

“That’s a good, girl. A li’l more, li’l more now.”

He kept the horse moving a step or two at a time until the warrior had been raised high enough that the body hung suspended just above the pair of lower branches.

“Stay put,” he cooed, patting the steady old roan on the neck before he turned back to the tree.

There he stripped off his wide belt and the elkhide coat, then wearing only the buffalo-fur vest in that bitter cold, Scratch pulled himself off the ground, swinging up and onto the first low branch. From there he shinnied himself onto the pair of limbs growing just below the gently swinging corpse. With his thick buffalo-hide moccasins gripping the two branches, he steadied himself with one hand locked on that higher limb the ropes were looped over, then grabbed one of those ropes with his other bare hand.

“Awright, horse—back now. C’mon back.”

He clucked with his tongue too, a sound he was sure the roan would recognize from their miles and seasons together. The horse twisted its head around as if to determine where that noise was coming from, so he repeated it.

Then reassured the roan, “C’mon.”

It took two steps back. “That’s good. Just a li’l more.”

Those coarse one-inch ropes slid through his callused palm as the red shroud eased down upon the two parallel branches. With a little more coaxing the horse inched back three more feet and stopped again; enough that Titus now had sufficient slack to loosen the knots around the ankles and shoulders as he crouched precariously on the limbs above the horse. One at a time he pitched the freed ropes over the branch above him so that they spiraled to the ground below him.

With one final tug on the shroud, he had the Blackfoot’s body positioned along the strongest portions of the parallel limbs. Then he dropped to the ground himself to pull on his coat once more before freeing the two ropes from the pommel and stuffing their loops atop one of the packs of trade goods.

Striding over to where the youngster had watched the whole ordeal in utter amazement, Scratch could read a completely new expression on the boy’s face.

“I figgered it was what you’d done your own self … if’n you’d been freed up to do it.” He knelt with a sigh. “Time for us to be movin’ for the day.”

Stuffing his knife into its scabbard suspended from the wide belt he buckled around the elkhide coat, Scratch worked at the knots tied around the youngster’s ankles while the look on the boy’s face changed to one of confusion mixed with no little fear.

Titus rocked forward on one knee, locking the other knee down upon the youth’s lower legs. “Ain’t gonna hurt you.”

Still holding the boy down, Titus pulled the rope free of the ankles and wrapped a loose end between the youngster’s bound wrists. Now he had a long section of the rope that would serve just like a lariat used on a led horse.

“C’mon. It’s time you stood up,” he said as he took a step backward, then a second.

Bass gestured with his free hand. “Stand
up.”

Slowly dragging his legs under him, the youth leaned his weight forward onto his bound hands and struggled to rise. But it was immediately clear that the muscles in
his legs were cramped from being bound together on the cold ground for so long. Titus stepped around to stand behind the boy, wrapped both of his arms beneath the youth’s armpits, and grunted him to his feet.

“Damn, son—if you aren’t a big chunk of it,” he grumbled as the youth came off the ground shakily.

Standing there at that moment, it surprised Scratch just how tall the youngster was. The top of his black hair reached Bass’s eyes. And he felt solid as a hickory stump. Thin, wiry, lean as whipcord to be sure—but solid nonetheless. This was a boy already galloping down the road to manhood, that much was certain.

For a moment the youngster wobbled unsteadily on his legs. Then he gradually got his balance, and Bass slowly released his grip on the Blackfoot.

“You’re gonna ride,” he explained as he steered the youth toward the horse that had carried the pups in those empty baskets Scratch was taking home as a present to Waits-by-the-Water.

“Take ’er easy,” he said as they kept walking, step by step. “Keep them pins under you or you’ll spill for certain.”

At the horse’s side, Scratch gestured that the youngster was to mount. It took no further urging as the boy grabbed a double handful of the horse’s mane there at the withers, then sprang onto the narrow back and settled himself. With the boy’s rope in one hand, Titus took the horse’s lead in the other and led them back to his roan.

Mounting up, he brought the horse around and stopped knee to knee with the youngster. “I figger this can be easy for both of us, or it can be hard on you. You behave yourself and you can ride like a man. You don’t behave—why, I’ll strap you over that there horse like two elk hindquarters. So it’s up to you.”

Scratch was just starting to put his heels into his horse’s ribs—when he stopped, his eye caught by that whistle hung against the boy’s chest. Bass turned a moment to gaze at the body on the limbs, then realized what he had done had one more step before all would be complete.

“You’ll wanna blow your kinfolk’s whistle, son,” he said quietly as he leaned over and grabbed the eagle wingbone, holding it up to the youngster’s lips.

The boy stared at him a moment, bewildered. Eventually he opened his mouth, leaned his head forward, and took the end of the whistle between his teeth.

Scratch settled himself in the saddle and nudged his horse forward, turning the roan about as he clucked for the lead horse to follow. The animal that carried Titus Bass’s young prisoner started away behind the white man.

And as they inched out of the skeletal shadows of that copse of cottonwoods onto the brilliant, shimmering white beauty of that pristine wilderness illuminated with a newly risen sun, Titus Bass heard the first tentative, eerie … and ultimately mournful notes of that eagle-wingbone whistle shriek behind him.

Unmistakably a warrior’s song: unearthly notes meant to accompany a fighting man’s soul on its lonely journey to that place where all warriors one day were bound to go.

It could have been a lot harder than it was, but for some reason the youngster understood that Titus Bass was just about his only means of staying alive.

That boy could have attempted an escape once, if not a dozen times over the next three days. At the least he could have struggled with the old white man when Bass led him to the pony, or when Titus helped him down from the horse. The youngster could have simply run off into the forest with his hands tied when he had to pee or squat.

But the Blackfoot was old enough to savvy which side his meat was roasted on. While he might hate the white man who had killed his kin or kith, and while he might well be scheming to make an escape of it somewhere down the line—the boy showed he was smart enough not to give the slightest impression that he might flee if given half a chance.

Not for a moment did Scratch think that the youngster wouldn’t sink a knife in the white man’s heart if he could get his hands on a weapon and was handed the opportunity. Why, it’d be damned foolish for him to believe this half-growed creature had suddenly turned docile. Not no young’un from such a warrior clan as the Blackfoot. Such a man-child was bred, born, whelped, and raised to be a fighter. In the marrow of him, Scratch knew Blackfoot were taught to hate Americans from the time they opened their eyes and sucked in their first breath. Taught to hate Crow too.

So what in the billy blue hell was he doing? Here he was, a white man—the one big argument against his indecision. And he was married to a Crow. Jehoshaphat! If the Blackfoot hated any group longer, hated any group stronger, than Americans—it was the goddamned Crow! A second powerful argument against his good-hearted charity.

Then you went and added the fact that in Yellow Belly’s village there were his two young children—half white and half Crow. Lordy! A third and a fourth mark against Titus Bass ever making a friend of the boy. What he needed to do was just turn the Blackfoot loose and ride away. Let the youngster go afoot, even give him some dried meat before he pointed him in the right direction. How had he ever been so foolish to believe that the boy might hold some compassion in his heart for the white man who had killed his blood kin?

Even
if
that white man had gone against his better instincts and put the body of that relative into a tree for a proper burial.

There was no changing what either of them were, and would always be. Enemies.

It was simply the order of things, and no mere mortal of a clay-footed man was going to change it.

For the most part over those next three days, it seemed the youngster rode along with his eyes as good as closed. If they were open at all, they were no more than slits because of the intense sunlight reflecting off that new snow. Especially during the late-afternoon when the sun
was setting in the west, far, far in front of them—that’s when the glare grew most cruel. It made no matter to Titus if the boy was sleeping as they plodded along, picking their way among and around the snowdrifts, doing his best to stay to the high runs where the snow hadn’t piled up so deep or had been blown clear altogether.

It made no difference to the old beaver trapper … because the boy never made any trouble for him. The Blackfoot ate when meat was offered him. And he drank when Titus gave him the melted snow in a tin, or provided a cup of weak coffee at their night fires. When Scratch’s eyes grew heavy beneath the clear, cold pinpricks of white light shining through the black-velvet drape of winter light, he would crab over to the youngster and check one last time to see that the knots were secure, that those knots on the long lead rope itself were turned toward the wrist so the boy had no chance whatever to work his fingers on them. Then Titus would retuck the old blanket and a buffalo robe around the youngster before he crabbed back to his own sleeping robes once more, dragging the end of the long lead rope to tuck beneath his belt, to wrap a loop around a wrist: the slightest movement of his prisoner would alert the boy’s keeper.

Come his rising of a morning, Scratch would find the youngster hadn’t budged and had to be awakened. In the end Titus admitted to himself that there was no plotting to escape. That the boy didn’t lie awake while the trapper drifted off so he could slip off in the dark with one of the horses, stealing one of those extra guns Bass had plundered off of one dead Indian after another over the seasons.

Right from that moment Scratch had put the body in the tree and placed the dead man’s whistle between the youngster’s lips, the Blackfoot pony holder hadn’t given the slightest hint of struggle or treachery.

So it was that early on the fourth afternoon after the untimely convergence of their fates that Titus Bass spotted a low, thin blanket of fire smoke trapped in the cold sky, a grayish-brown band of it clinging just above the
trees … and knew it had to be the Crow. If not Yellow Belly’s band, then surely they were Crow.

At the top of the rimrock, Scratch brought them to a halt and let the animals blow. He turned in the saddle, looking at the boy, and could see the youngster had noticed the fire smoke too. When those black-cherry eyes shifted to peer into his, Titus could plainly read the fear that was turning to resignation. A look that seemed to say,
I know you’ve brought me to this camp of my enemies to test my manhood. And I am ready to die.

It was then that Bass understood what he had to do.

With a sudden sense of urgency, he realized they had little time before the sun would be making its descent.

“C’mon.

He clucked to the horses, his eyes briefly brushing the boy’s face, recognizing that the youngster was baffled again. Just when the boy had made peace with the fact that he was being led to torture and eventual slaughter, the white man was turning their little pack train away from the fire smoke and heading down the back side of the rimrocks instead of pushing on for the village that lay ahead in a horseshoe bend of the river.

It took them something more than an hour before Bass felt they had come far enough. They hadn’t crossed any pony tracks, so it was clear the Crow hunters weren’t yet working this side of the river for game. Here, two ridges beyond the north bank of the Yellowstone, Bass slid from his saddle and hit the snow, breaking through the three-day-old crust and sinking past his ankles.