Crack in the Sky (77 page)

“Ti-tess!”

Sounded something like his name.

Bass whirled again on the crowd and started moving once more—the hair prickling on the back of his neck. As he pushed ahead through the widening gauntlet, his eyes searched the faces, spotting a man forcing his way through the pack to stand in the open some twenty feet away between the two columns.

“Ti-tess!”

“Bird in Ground?” He quickly looked over the man wrapped in a heavy wool blanket. “That really you?”

“Me, Ti-tess!” the man-woman shouted, and came hurrying across the snow as fast as his blanket would allow.

The blanket opened as Bird in Ground reached the trapper, revealing the beautiful dress the man-woman
wore, heavily decorated with elk milk teeth. The Crow threw his arms around Scratch, embracing and pounding the startled white man on the back.

“I’ll be damned,” Bass muttered.

“Yes, damned,” the Indian repeated in his best imitation of his mentor’s speech.

“I recall some of these here faces …” and his voice trailed off. Then he set the rifle butt on the ground and signed while he spoke in what little Crow he remembered from winters gone before. “This is
your
camp?”

The man-woman nodded. “Some of these people remember your visit so many winters ago.”

Quickly gazing at the cluster of faces watching the two of them expectantly, Bass drew his shoulders back. “My friend: in your camp … there are five thieves.”

“Thieves?” Bird in Ground repeated.

He signed for “horse,” remembering the Crow didn’t have a word for “mule.” “Pony thieves. Five of your men took my three horses. Two nights ago. I followed them here.”

“Yes,” and the man-woman turned, pulling the blanket around his shoulders. He pointed off through the camp. “They came in a short time ago. Shouting, happy—proud of their new horses.”

“I want my horses back,” Bass signed and said in his stuttering Crow. “Then … I want those five—here.”

“You came to take their scalps?” Bird in Ground asked, his eyes narrowing.

“I get my horses back,” he explained, “I won’t want their lives. Just want some of their blood.”

“You will fight all five—as one finger would fight the whole other hand?”

“If I have to,” Bass answered. “But one especially: the man I watched beat one of my animals.”

“Where was this?” a voice demanded above the murmurs of the crowd.

Scratch turned, peering over Bird in Ground’s shoulder at the tall, regal warrior approaching them from afar. Already the crowd had parted for this impressive figure the moment he had emerged from his lodge, which sat at the
center of the great camp circle. Quickly Bass glanced at the tall tripod standing near the doorway as the villagers stepped back in deference to this handsome and powerful man.

Turning back to Bird in Ground, Titus asked, “You lived with Big Hair’s band—”

“These are the same people,” the man explained as the tall warrior approached. “We were Big Hair’s band.”

“What became of your chief?”

“Big Hair was killed in a fight with the Blackfoot,” the man-woman explained just as the tall warrior came to a halt and his expressive eyes measured the white man. Bird in Ground continued, “The new chief of our people … is Arapooesh.”

“Ara … Arapooesh,” Bass repeated, then took off his mitten and held out his hand.

For a moment the chief looked down at it, then seized Bass’s wrist in his hand, and they shook, gripping one another’s forearms. The tall man had a warm and genuinely disarming smile.

“Ti-tuzz Bazz,” Bird in Ground explained the white man’s name.

After repeating the foreign sounds for himself, Arapooesh pointed at the fur cap pulled so far down over Bass’s head it reached clear to the eyebrows, hung below his ears on both sides. He said something so rapidly to Bird in Ground that Scratch was able to follow none of it.

“Arapooesh asked if you had a long trip. If you stayed warm.”

“Yes, I stayed warm,” Bass replied, wondering how much of that answer was the truth. “Tell your chief why I am here.”

Bird in Ground asked, “The horse thieves?”

“Thieves?” Arapooesh echoed.

“Yes,” the Crow man-woman told the chief. “The white man followed the men who stole his horses. Their trail led him to our camp.”

“The horse thieves came here?”

Bird in Ground nodded, his eyes narrowing. “I know the ones, Arapooesh. I saw them return this morning after
they were gone many days. They brought two ponies and the white man’s strange horse with them.”

“Strange horse?” Arapooesh asked.

“Half-a-horse,” the Crow man-woman attempted to explain.

“Ahh, I have seen some of those,” and then the chief studied Bass a moment more. “Are you a friend of Bird in Ground?”

And the Crow man quickly responded, “Yes, he is a friend of mine.”

“No,” Arapooesh snapped, his eyes coming back to Scratch. “I asked the white man.”

“I am Bird in Ground’s friend.”

“Are you a friend of the Crow?” asked the chief.

For a moment he thought, then said, “I am the friend of all Crow who do not steal from me. I am friend of all Crow who have honor.”

The chief seemed to measure the heft of those words, then replied, “My people like horses very much. Sometimes we find horses, we take them for our own—”

“I have never done a thing to hurt the Crow,” Bass interrupted angrily.

“This is a good man, Arapooesh,” Bird in Ground explained. “He listens to our people talk and tries to understand. He even tries to understand about a woman who was born in this man’s body.”

As Arapooesh regarded Bass, he scratched his smooth, plucked chin and finally said, “Tell me, Bird in Ground … tell me the names of the men who stole the white man’s horses.”

Clearing his throat, plainly nervous, the man-woman toed the snow before him and eventually spoke the names of the five he believed were the raiders.

Arapooesh’s eyes narrowed with concern. “You are certain?”

“These are the five I saw come to camp this morning with the two ponies and the half horse.”

“But,” Arapooesh said, wagging his head, “these are not …”

“They stole from the white man. They stole from the
man who is my friend. Stole from one who has done no wrong to our people.”

As he drank in a deep breath, his chest swelling in contemplation, the chief finally turned away to raise his voice over the crowd. “I call for these five to come here so that I may talk to them: Red Leggings, Comes Inside the Door, Crow Shouting, Sees the Star, and … and Pretty On Top.”

As several voices in the crowd took up the cry, echoing those five names and shouting the chiefs command through the village, the rest in the great throng started to murmur and whisper. Just when Bass was coming to believe that the five would not dare show their faces, the crowd parted in a rush of noisy excitement. Through that widening gap stepped the five.

Titus blinked his eyes, recognizing the tall, thick curl heavily greased and pinned atop one of the thieves’ heads. He was Hannah’s tormentor.

Suddenly seething all the way to the soles of his feet, Scratch started to lunge forward—then stopped abruptly. Shocked: for the first time looking closely at the five, into the faces of those horse thieves, into the eyes of these … boys.

He whipped around on Bird in Ground, flushing with sudden rage. “W-what is this!” he sputtered in English, then asked in that foreign tongue. “These are boys!”

“Boys,” the chief repeated in Crow as the five came to a stop near Arapooesh, eyeing the white man suspiciously. “Yes, they are boys.”

“We are men now,” disputed the one with the tall greased curl on his head.

Bird in Ground sneered. “You are men because you stole three horses from one white man?”

“Three was all he had,” said another of the youngsters, then laughed with the rest.

“So you did take this man’s horses?” Arapooesh asked, silencing them.

Perhaps believing that he had good reason to boast, the one with the curl said, “We went out to steal horses,
Arapooesh. We stole some and brought them back to our camp.”

“But you stole a lone man’s horses!” Bird in Ground protested.

The curled one snorted, “I will not be talked to like this by a creature who has a manhood between his legs but does not want to be a man!”

As swiftly as a camp robber swoops down to raid the meat-drying racks, Bird in Ground lunged forward and smacked his flat hand across the youth’s face. “Pretty On Top!” he shrieked. “I am a person of honor … one who is strong enough to kill you with my bare hands!”

Arapooesh stepped between Bird in Ground and the youngster as Pretty On Top started for the man-woman. “There will be no fighting between my people today.”

“No woman talks to a warrior like this—”

“You are not a warrior!”

Again the youngster leaped for Bird in Ground, his hands thrashing like claws ripping the air.

But Arapooesh restrained him. “What he says is true, Pretty On Top. You are not a warrior.”

Wounding crossed his face: Pretty On Top slowly brought the fingers of one hand up to touch the bright-red mark on his cheek where he had been slapped. But it was plain that his feelings suffered more pain than had his flesh. “How will you ever call me a warrior, or how will any man ever ask me to come along on a scalp raid … if you won’t even consider me a man when I steal a white man’s horses.”

“The white man,” Arapooesh started to explain, “he is not our enemy.”

“Ever since the first white men came to our country,” Pretty On Top argued, “our people have stolen their horses.”

Sees the Star agreed, his head bobbing. “The Crow have never killed a white man.”

“You will never steal from this man!” Bird in Ground demanded.

Pretty On Top snorted with laughter. “Is this white man your …
husband?”

Some of the young people in the crowd sniggered behind their hands.

Bird in Ground’s cheeks flushed with anger. “Little boys like you will never understand the ways of a real man,” he declared, putting his face up close to the youth’s, “because you will never grow up to become a man.”

This time the tall adolescent swung his arm back, ready to slap the older man, when his wrist was suddenly caught in the trapper’s mitten.

“That’s right. You’re no man yet,” Bass grunted in Crow as he pushed the strong youth’s arm down, “because a man would never strike a friend.”

Pretty On Top seized the wrist of the hand the white man had clamped on him, and for a moment they glared into one another’s eyes. “You are no friend of mine!” And he tried to fling Bass’s arm aside.

Instead, Scratch slowly released his grip. “I am a friend of the Crow. I am a friend to all men of honor and bravery.” He turned to look into the face of Arapooesh, saying, “Until the Crow blacken their faces against me, I will be a friend to your people. Your friends are my friends. Your enemies … they are my enemies too.”

“My people, we are not many,” the chief exclaimed as he laid his hand on the big youth’s shoulder. “We cannot afford to turn away any man who says he is our friend, any man who says he will stand against our enemies with us.”

Some of the women in the crowd trilled their tongues in approval, and several of the old men raised their voices in triumph.

“It was good you came to us this winter,” Bird in Ground said.

With a smile Scratch replied, “I did not intend to visit your camp this soon.”

With his strong hand Arapooesh turned to Pretty On Top so that he stared the tall youth directly in the eye. “We have this problem of the white man’s horses.”

“They are our horses now!” the youth barked in protest.

Bird in Ground lunged up to shout, “You stole from a friend of ours!”

“You’ve never stolen a horse in your life!” Red Leggings snapped as he came to stand beside Pretty On Top.

Arapooesh laid his other hand on Red Leggings’ shoulder. Now he clamped his hands down hard and said to them, “We do not steal from those who are our friends.”

The five youths started to sputter in protest, but the chief dug his fingers into the shoulders of the two until their knees began to buckle and they howled in pain.

“But we went out to risk our lives!” Pretty On Top wailed. “We wanted to show our people we were brave enough to go on a pony raid of our own!”

And Comes Inside the Door agreed, “If the older warriors weren’t going to ask us along on the raids they were leading, then Pretty On Top said we would have our own raid to show our bravery!”

“And you all were very, very brave,” Arapooesh declared. “No man or woman in this camp will question your courage. From this day all will know that you five are brave enough to start on the path that will make you warriors. And … all of our people will know that you five are wise, that you are men of honor who will do what is right.”

For a moment the youths looked at one another; then Pretty On Top asked, “You are ordering us to return the white man’s horses?”

“You tell me,” the chief said. “What would a true warrior do? One who did not care about his own wealth, but only about the wealth of his people?”

“But a warrior grows rich by going to war!” Crow Shouting protested.

“And one day you will go to war,” Arapooesh replied. “So tell me: what would an honorable man do?”

Pretty On Top hung his head a moment. And when he spoke, the words came out as if they had a bitter taste on his tongue. “He would return the horses to the white man.”

In a loud voice the chief asked, “Is that the answer for all of you?”

The other four muttered their agreement.

Clapping his hands on the two shoulders of the youngsters standing before him, Arapooesh roared with approval. “You three, go bring me the white man’s animals.”

Crow Shouting, Sees the Star, and Comes Inside the Door immediately turned away and pushed their way through the crowd.

As they left, the chief announced in his booming voice, “Today the heart of our people has been strengthened! Whenever a man does an honorable act, all our people are made stronger for it! And when a man does something that reflects well upon our people, we will reward his good works!”