Ride the Moon Down (10 page)

Rotten Belly simply wasn’t the sort who rode off half-cocked, spoiling for a fight, taking stupid chances. No, he had always been a warrior’s warrior, a prudent fighter who persisted in considering the odds and planning every detail of the battles he led against the enemy.

But the Crow had many enemies, and they were strong. Rotten Belly’s mountain band of the Crow required a vigilant defense. For a man like Arapooesh that meant more than sending his young warriors into battle—it meant leading them himself.

Rotten Belly had been killed in battle against the Blackfoot.

Waits-by-the-Water’s parents welcomed them into their lodge that first night of celebration and homecoming. Grandmother and grandfather could not take their eyes and hands off little Magpie, playing and talking with the child until she grew hungry and ready for bed. Across the
fire, Bass did his best to join in with their talk from time to time—but for the most part he sat silent, staring at the flames, listening to the crackle of wood and the wolfish wind howling without the buffalo-hide walls. He wondered on Rotten Belly’s spirit. Where it was on its journey. Would he have already reached the end of that long star road to spend out the rest of eternity with the likes of Zane, Hatcher, and McAfferty, even with all of those Arapooesh himself had killed in battle?

That first night he awoke, fitful and damp. Slipping from beneath the blankets, Bass sat up in the dull red glow of the coals in the fire pit where he laid some small pieces of wood and watched the low flames till dawn when Magpie stirred, awakening her mother.

“I must go away for a few days.”

“We only arrived,” she said, lifting the baby to her breast.

On the far side of the lodge her parents stirred. The old couple sat up, but remained silent in the dim light, curious. Waits stared at her husband’s gray face, his sleepless, red eyes, trying so hard to read something there that would allow her to understand.

With his empty hands gesturing futilely before him, Bass said, “I must do something.”

“Give yourself a few days to rest,” she pleaded. “You have worked so hard, been on the move ever since we left the place where all the white men gather.”

Wagging his head in despair, Titus tried to explain. “I am torn. I do not want to leave you and Magpie—but something tells me I must be alone with this terrible news we were given last night.”

“Is this your heart crying out in hurt for He-Who-Has-Died?” she asked, referring to the departed without speaking his name.

Staring into the fire pit, he admitted, “Yes. I must go away to mourn for him—”

“Stay and mourn for him here,” she begged, patting the blankets beside her. “Ever since last summer my people … his people have mourned for him in his own camp. It is good to shed the tears among others.”

He crabbed closer to her, leaning against her shoulder. “My grief comes easy.”

His wife’s parents stirred. Her father, Whistler, left their blankets to scoot next to the fire. His black hair had only recently begun to show the iron of his considerable winters. He said, “Mourning does not belong only to women.”

Crane, her mother, added, “Tears should never frighten a strong man.”

With her free arm Waits-by-the-Water pulled Bass’s brow against her cheek. “My father speaks good words. Your tears tell me you are a strong man, strong enough to show how much you miss He-Who-Has-Died.”

“I raised my daughter to show her heart,” Whistler said. “But she must realize that we all grieve in our own way. If you believe you must ride into the hills to mourn, then that is where your spirit calls you to go.”

Waits tried to speak for a moment, but ultimately admitted she was not going to convince her husband that he should stay. “I will miss you. Hurry back to us.”

She turned away quickly, a gesture that tugged plaintively at his heart. Scratch knew she hoped to hide her face, those sad eyes, from him. He watched her back as she settled upon their blankets and gathered the baby to her breast.

He laid a hand on her shoulder and said, “I have lost so many in my life, friends. I don’t want to lose you, lose even your love.”

She laid her hand upon his, finally turning to gaze up at him, her eyes brimming, half-filled with tears. “When you left our camp two winters ago,” Waits-by-the-Water said, her voice no more than a choking whisper, “when you went away angry at me—I realized I never wanted to know that pain again.”

“I don’t want to hurt—”

“And when you went east to follow the trail of those who had cheated you … I vowed I would never let you leave me again. I promised myself that I would always go with you.”

“Before you realize, I’ll be back,” he promised, watching
the tears spill down her cheeks, drops she licked as they hung pendant from her upper lip.

“I know,” she whispered, and squeezed his hand. “You must go to mourn the loss of another friend.”

As his wife finished nursing Magpie, Titus Bass hurriedly lashed a blanket inside a single robe. He made certain he took a little tobacco and his own clay pipe, stuffing them deep into his possibles bag with his flint and steel. Seeing that his horn was filled with powder and his shooting pouch weighed down with lead balls, Scratch stepped outside into the early light as Zeke leaped to all fours there beside the door.

“C’mon, boy,” he whispered to the dog as he knelt, scratching its ears, gazing into the animal’s attentive eyes. “Let’s go fetch up Samantha.”

With the mule, man and dog hurried back from the tiny corral where he had confined their stock. After cinching the riding saddle around her, he lashed his bedding behind the cantle, then ducked back inside the lodge.

“I want you to take my pipe,” Whistler pleaded as he stepped up to the white man. “I smoked it when I grieved for my brother’s death. Now I want you to take it into the hills with you so you can offer your grief with it.”

Eventually he took the pipe from Whistler’s hand suspended between them. “By giving me your pipe, you do me a great honor.”

“By mourning my brother, your friend, in your own way, you do his family a great honor.”

As the two men gripped one another’s forearms, Crane said, “Remember to drink water, or eat the snow. If you cut yourself in grief, you must drink water.”

“I’ll remember.”

Quietly Crane explained, “It is winter. You will need lots of water if your flesh weeps in sorrow too.”

For a moment Bass looked at the two of them, then asked Whistler, “Where did you leave his body?”

“South of here. Near the Grey Bull River. He-Who-Has-Died is lying in his lodge until his body returns to the earth and winds.”

“Perhaps I will go look for this place where you left
his lodge,” Bass replied, then heard the surprised squeak of air escape his wife’s throat.

Turning to step up to Waits-by-the-Water, Titus vowed, “I will return when I have grieved for He-Who-Is-No-Longer-Here.”

As Bass knelt to gather his wife in his arms, Magpie reached out to seize that single narrow braid he always wore at the right ear. Bass kissed his daughter, gently tugging her hand free of that bound hair. Then kissed his wife’s lips, long and lingering.

“I will think of you both, often,” he said, then turned on his heel and ducked into the sunshine as Zeke whirled twice round his legs, clearly eager for the trail.

Miles away to the south along the gurgling creekbank, Scratch turned into the hills rising sharply in the west. The higher he climbed, the deeper the snow became—changing from no more than a windblown skiff to an icy crust deep enough to brush his calves by the time Samantha had tired and he’d dropped to the ground at the edge of some rocks jutting from the barren side of a hill that overlooked part of the valley below. Here where only some clumps of sage dotted the white, pristine slope, nothing obstructed his view. With a brilliant autumn sun overhead, Bass pulled the camp ax from the back of his belt and trudged to some nearby brush where he hacked off a number of branches he dragged behind him when he returned to the boulders.

Thatching those limbs across one another on the snow, he constructed a crude platform that for the most part would keep him out of the snow, dampness, and cold through the hours and days to come. Retrieving his blanket and robe, Titus loosened Samantha’s cinch, then tied her off in some brush down the slope a ways where she could graze on some grass blown free of snow. He was winded by the time he and the dog made the slippery climb back to his perch where he spread out the robe across the small platform, fur side up.

Next he used his bare hands to scrape the snow away from a small circle directly in front of his platform. Zeke inched forward, sniffing with intense curiosity at that patch of earth Bass was clearing.

“G’won,” he told the dog. “Lay over there so you’ll stay outta my way.”

Zeke turned and circled the man twice, eventually settling on the snow near the rocks where he could watch his master.

In the crude circle he had cleared, Bass piled small twigs and slivers of bark he broke off the limbs beneath him. With enough small wood near at hand, Scratch unfurled the blanket and clutched it around his shoulders before he settled down upon the platform. By bunching the robe around him, Bass was ready to load Whistler’s pipe with his trade tobacco.

Once the tall redstone bowl was filled, Scratch laid a sliver of charred cloth on the top of his thigh, striking the fire-steel against the flint, sending a tiny shower of sparks onto the blackened char. Quickly laying the cloth with its glowing ember over the top of the bowl, Titus sucked steadily on the stem, drawing the fire into the tobacco and smoke across his tongue, sinking deep into his lungs.

Then he pulled the glowing char from the top of the bowl, laying it on a small piece of pithy wood. Blowing on the ember, he quickly ignited the dry pith. With it smoking readily, Bass stuffed the wood beneath the center of the fire pit he had cleared in the snow and laid several of the smallest twigs over the smoky embers. Leaning to the side to blow across the pith, the dead twigs suddenly burst into flame. He added more, larger twigs, then leaned back and sucked on the pipe.

With the smoke held momentarily in his lungs, Bass gazed out across the valley. On his left sat the sere bluffs and red-hued rimrock marking-the valley of the Yellowstone. Off to his right rose the great bulk of the Absaroka Range. And before him in the middistance sat the Pryor Mountains. This had been Rotten Belly’s country—a land held by the might of an able chief at the head of a powerful people.

As the sun continued to crawl toward midsky, Titus smoked the last of the tobacco in that pipe bowl, with each long puff recalling some memory of He-Who-Had-Died. Both good times and tragic. Remembering how Arapooesh
had told visitors that this land of Absaroka was in the right place: not too cold and not too warm, notso far east onto the plains that the Crow could not gather in the cool shadows of the mountains. Remembering how the chief had stepped into the middle of his people’s grief and fury, offering two white men the challenge of bringing back the hair of a third white trapper, the hair of a murderer.

Arapooesh, who winters’ ago had accepted Bass as a brother. This man Rotten Belly who had adopted Josiah Paddock as one of his own relations.

When the pipe went out, Titus turned the bowl over and tapped it against the heel of his hand, knocking the ash and blackened dollop into the tiny fire before him. With a twig he scraped some of the growing mound of ash to the edge of the snow he had cleared from the bare ground. Setting the pipe aside on the robe, Bass dragged the coyote-fur hat, then untied the faded blue of the silk bandanna, from his head, laying both by Whistler’s pipe.

Now that his naked skull was exposed to the winter sky, he carefully scooped up a little of the warm ash into both hands. Slowly he dumped the ashes on top of his head, using both hands to smear their warmth through his hair, rubbing it across that pale patch of bone.

Reaching around to his back, Bass pulled free the long, much-used skinning knife from its sheath. Seizing that narrow braid he wore at his right ear, he dragged the blade of his knife across the middle of the braid, hacking it free. After flinging it into the flames at his knee, Scratch grabbed a handful of his long graying hair, sawing it loose, then tossing it into the fire where the strands sizzled and smoked, choking the cold breeze with its terrible stench. Clump by clump, he continued to work around the base of his head, crudely chopping off his curly hair until what remained hung just above his shoulders in ragged, uneven tatters, most of it choked with ash.

For a long time that early afternoon he continued to sit there, adding pieces of limb and branch to his little fire, sensing the breeze blow cold across the flesh of his neck where he had sawed off long sections of his hair, exposing his skin to the teeth in every gust of wind. Eventually he
loaded Whistler’s pipe a second time and smoked, remembering other friends he had lost across the years.

Good men who had welcomed him into their lives and their hearts without conditions. Men who had become a part of Bass’s life, friends now become the chinking in so many of his memories. Old friends who had loved their life and their freedom as much as Scratch loved his.

Puff by puff he drew the strong, stinging tobacco into his lungs, then slowly exhaled as the breeze whipped the smoke away while he offered up his remembrances like a prayer. One by one he asked each of those who were gone to look down upon him now and in the months and years to come.

Strange, he thought, but when he was a youngster back on the Ohio after running away from home, he had always believed life was bound to get easier the older he became. Then he managed to collide with the wrong women—females who discovered his weakness, his need, and what unerring devotion he offered them—women who took and took until they left him behind. Certain that wisdom had come after every broken heart, Bass instead found a newer, deeper hurt with each new love. Instead of life growing easier, he discovered that life offered him no simple answers, no respite from the painful learning as he was knocked about.

How innocent he had been in earlier years, to believe that as he put mistakes behind him, he would find life all the easier. But for every woman who had scarred him, for every misstep he had made in life, there nonetheless had been a good friend who stood at his shoulder.