Death Rattle (53 page)

Immediately he went to the boy’s side and motioned that he would help the youngster climb down too. When the Blackfoot stood unsteadily in the deep snow, Scratch pointed to his groin, pantomiming how a man held himself while urinating before he gestured toward the ten-foot-high willows nearby.

“G’won. Be ’bout your business, over there.”

The boy stood frozen a moment until Scratch threw down that coil of lead rope he held in a mitten. A bit reluctantly, the youngster turned away to trudge toward the thick brush.

The moment he did, Bass tore his mittens off as he hurried back to one of the war party’s ponies, where Titus began to work at the knots holding the blanket and buffalo robe the boy had been using the past few nights—the same blanket and robe Scratch discovered among the raiders’ horses the morning after the attack. He took a moment to study the Blackfoot animals—then selected one. As the white man threw the robe and blanket over the back of the strongest pony, the youngster came back to stand, watching the process with no little curiosity.

Understandably, the boy was a little confused too—because this was not the horse he had been riding across Absaroka the last four days. Maybe, Titus figured, the youngster had decided something was about to happen now that it was clear this wasn’t just a brief stop to wet down the bushes.

With the bedding secured with a wide strap, Scratch trudged through the deep snow to one of the packhorses, where he lifted a flap of the protective oiled sheeting and freed a pouch of smoked meat. Then pulled out the dead warrior’s belt.

Scuffing back through the crusty snow he stopped before the boy and dropped the pouch at the youngster’s side. Bass took a moment to inspect the belt, finding a much used whetstone in a leather pouch hung from the belt, an awl in a beaded awl case, along with several small amulets—besides the large knife that swung freely from the thick leather decorated with tarnished tacks of brass.

With a sigh, he finally gazed into the boy’s eyes. Then freed the strap from its buckle and placed the belt around the youngster’s waist, rebuckling it at the front flaps of the thick winter capote. Taking a step backward, he looked the boy up and down. It was some time before the Blackfoot looked into the white man’s face, tearing his eyes from the belt where his bound hands rested, fingertips touching the heads of those brass tacks, brushing those special totems to some sacred power.

Quickly, before he lost the courage and will to go through with his plan, Scratch stepped close once more,
his bare hands wrestling with the knots he had secured many days ago, knots he tightened every morning and night. Eventually, the cold, stiff rope relented and allowed him to work it free.

A breath caught in the boy’s chest as the ropes fell away and the trapper stepped back again, rapidly looping the lariat in his left hand.

“It’s getting late. Late,” and he pointed to the sun hanging in that last quadrant of the western sky. “Time you be going.” Then he sighed. “I may goddamn well be teched in the head to let you go free, with that there knife of your brother’s … but I still got ’nough sense not to leave you go with a gun. You’ll have to make it with just that there knife.”

He bent and retrieved the canvas pouch. Held it out at arm’s length to the youngster. “Here. You’ll need food afore you ever run ’cross some of your own people. Meat,” and he gestured with his right hand, fingers to his mouth as if eating.

The youngster took the pouch.

“G’won. That there horse is your’n now,” and he motioned to the Blackfoot pony he had prepared with the makeshift saddle pad. “I’m takin’ the rest of them Blackfoot ponies though I don’t really need ’em. Hell … what good is more horses when I got plenty awready? Likely just give ’em away when I get home to my family,” he explained. “Damn, if I ain’t seen an’ wrangled more horses than I ever wanna see again in the rest of my days, truth be knowed. A damnable breed, these big critters: we come to depend on ’em like no other animule, even them two dogs there. Because of horses I been gone from my woman and young’uns too long. Because of horses I near lost the rest of my hair and my hide too. Californy horses. Shit …”

His voice trailed off as he became aware he was chattering, running off at the lip like a nabob. He felt like scolding himself for that attempt to prolong the farewell that must now take its course.

Instead of speaking any further, he reached out with both hands, taking the boy’s wrists in them and rubbing,
as if to return the circulation to the flesh where the ropes had chafed them raw. Then he turned the youngster around and nudged him over to the pony.

“Get up there. An’ go.”

The boy swallowed, slowly turned away, and took up the single lead tied to the animal’s buffalo-hair headstall. Without hesitation he leaped onto the pony’s back. But instead of immediately heeling the horse away in giddy celebration, the youngster sat looking down at the white man.

“G’won. Git. You’re burnin’ what li’l daylight you got left. G’won back to your own people.”

It surprised Scratch when the boy suddenly spoke. Even with those growls, and shrieks, and howls of fury that night of the attack—Titus had never really heard the youngster’s voice. Now he was speaking Blackfoot—as foreign as any sound ever would be to fall on Bass’s ears. No matter that he did not understand the meaning of the words, he could fathom their import from the tone and tenor of that young voice, from the look on the boy’s face, the emotion clearly seen in those eyes.

Even more than the spoken Blackfoot, it surprised the trapper when the youngster eventually put that eagle-wingbone whistle between his lips as he reined the pony away, urging the animal into a gentle lope through the snow as it carried him north from the land of the enemy, back to the land of his people.

It raised the hair at the back of Scratch’s neck when the winter wind suddenly shifted, a bitter gust bringing with it the eerie, high-pitched battle cry of that whistle.

And in that moment as the wind blew long strands of his graying hair across his face, a wind so bitterly cold it made his eyes water, Titus Bass came to understand that with the death of one warrior … another had been given birth.

He pushed the horses harder now than he ever had on their journey north.

Once Titus had them onto the bottom ground, he goaded the animals into a rolling lope across those last few miles as the setting sun first turned the layers of fire smoke to that dull, washed-out orange of the wood lily, eventually brightening into the same pale pink found in the shooting star that would poke its head out of the snow come early spring. Both dogs managed to match the pace he set, covering the icy ground beside the long-legged horses, their pinkish tongues lolling.

From the top of a low ridge he got his first look at the lodges. Cones discolored to various earth tones of brown, every pair of yawning smoke flaps blackened with unnumbered fires. A few of the lodges even supported by poles so long their shape was that of murky hourglasses plopped down in that narrow, meandering meadow beside the rocky creek he would have to cross before he was home.

Bass sensed his heart catch in his throat to look at what lay before him. The horse herd flooded much of the
open ground where the brown cones did not stand in an irregular crescent, their doorways facing the creek. Knots of children engaged in the last games of the day, bundled warmly against the frightening cold, some of them trundling along the stream bank where free water coursed through a narrow channel between two borders of snow-covered ice. Each rounded rock along the shore was covered with a dainty dollop of fresh, white snow, like a scullery maid’s white mobcap perched atop her brown hair.

Of a sudden he heard their voices—excited children at play, the rattle of their sticks they raked along the rocks, chasing one another and scraping snow from the stones. Perhaps the older ones had been sent to gather up their younger charges now that night was imminent. Laughter, lots of laughter—

A handful of them stopped their running game and turned to face the ridge. Two pointed in his direction. More of their voices, louder now.

From the trees along the bank appeared more than a dozen riders an instant later. In that silence a moment ago filled only with the laughter of children, now intruded the clatter of pony hooves as the animals lurched off the low cutbank and onto the rocky gravel blanketing the sandbars.

He tore the old coyote-fur cap from his head and stood in the stirrups, waving the cap at the end of his arm. And began to shout,
“Pote Ani! Pote Ani!”
Four of the riders continued across the ford where the water slowed through a shallow stretch while the rest remained in position on the rocky ground.

“C’mon, boys,” he said quietly to the Cheyenne horses. “That’s home down there.”

After covering some forty yards, Scratch found a wide cut where the ridge had eroded, a cleft that led him and the horses down to the east bank of the creek where that quartet of riders was already waiting on the snowy sandbar.

“These are trading goods from the fort at the mouth of
the Buffalo Tongue River?” asked Three Iron, a younger man, who inched his horse ahead to greet the white man.

“No, old friend.” Bass gasped with joy and surprise at seeing a familiar face. “They are presents.”

“So many presents?” Stiff Arm asked now as he urged his horse up beside that of Three Iron. “All these ponies are loaded with presents?”

“Yes!” Bass felt exuberant as he dusted off his rusty Crow, unused in so long. “My heart is so glad to be home again.”

A quizzical look passed over Three Iron’s face as the other two inched their ponies forward. “We … everyone thought you dead,
Pote Ani”
“It has been so long,” agreed Stiff Arm.

Bass suddenly felt some of his exuberance oozing as he realized just how long he had been away. “Yes, I have been gone many moons, but, look for yourselves … I am not dead.”

Three Iron gulped. “Your wife—”

“Waits-by-the-Water?” he interrupted the camp guard. “Does she believe I am dead too?”

With a wag of his head, Three Iron declared, “Like Stiff Arm said, you were gone so long.”

Then Stiff Arm himself explained, “And you did not come back.”

A sudden cold seized him. “My wife, and children … they—”

Three Iron turned on the bare back of his pony and pointed at the village. “They are camped at the southern end of the crescent,
Pote Ani.
Next to relations.”

For a moment he could not get the words out, his mind racing over the vocabulary, struggling to put voice to the question he most feared. Then, “My wife … Waits-by-the-Water, she did not give up on me to … to m-marry another?”

Stiff Arm shook his head, “No. She did not find a new husband.”

“S-so she is mourning?”

This time Three Irons nodded dolefully. “Yes. She has been alone for so long now.”

Titus was already jabbing his heels urgently into the ribs of the weary saddle horse as those last few words struck his ears. He yanked on the lead rope to the first packhorse as the whole string clattered onto the stony sandbar and entered the shallow ford. By now, more than fifty people had gathered on the far bank, a third of them children. They and a few camp dogs began to part as his roan came out of the shallow water, the horse’s legs dripping in the light that was leaking from the pale, pink western sky. His two dogs bristled warning at the curious curs that slinked too close, then stopped among the snow-covered rocks to give themselves a quick, vigorous shake from neck to tail root before racing to rejoin Bass’s horse as it lunged up the low cutbank and angled into the village.

The murmuring accompanied him as he turned among the lodges, sawing the saddle horse left as he hurried toward the southern end of the camp crescent. More and more of the people who had been on their way to the crossing came to a sudden halt, stopping to stare up at him as he led more than fifteen horses right down the main thoroughfare of the village. Some of them called out his name in excitement and relief.

Men who had known him as Rotten Belly’s white friend, who remembered him as Whistler’s trusted son-in-law, and those warriors who saw Titus Bass as the man who had honored Strikes In Camp with that final battle against the Blackfeet … many of them now raised their arms high in salute, some shaking their weapons to pay tribute to a fellow warrior.

And some of those women who recognized him quietly muttered his name. Many put their fingers over their mouths in shock and utter surprise, eyes wide as Mexican conchos.

“Popo!” the child cried.

A few yards ahead he spotted the short figure lumbering toward him across the trampled snow, one arm waving as she shuffled in an ungainly wobble, clearly hampered by the tiny blanketed bundle astride her hip.

“Magpie?” he cried in exuberance, although he was
already sure as he yanked back on the reins. Fifteen yards behind her came a figure, not quite as tall, running to catch up. Titus sang out, “Magpie! It is you!”

“Popo!” she shrieked in excitement.

Titus hit the ground as his daughter crossed those last few steps to reach the horses. The moment he knelt she flung her empty arm around him. Clasping his daughter in a fierce embrace, he felt the tiny body at the very moment the small infant cried out.