Ride the Moon Down (18 page)

“So how’d McKenzie get his head on the plate?”

“I s’pose he figgered since he couldn’t sneak no whiskey up to Fort Union, leastways he’d make his own right there,” the trader explained. “Brought up the still on the supply steamer, and he grew his own grain at Union. His plan was working fine till word drifted back downriver. I allays figgered it was Sublette or Campbell stabbed McKenzie in the back that way.”

“From all I learnt ’bout Sublette at ronnyvoo last summer, I’d say he’s one real oily nigger, the sort what’d cut you off at the knees just to get his hands on a few more beaver plews.”

“Astor’s cut him a deal with Sublette and Campbell,” Tullock admitted. “Now the company has a year with no competition on the upper Missouri, while Sublette’s free to work the mountain trade alone.”

“Jehoshaphat! That oughtta suit them two beaver thieves!” Bass exclaimed. “What’s to become of the trade now that Sublette drove Astor and McKenzie out of the business and got all the ronnyvoo trade to themselves, while the Frenchies gonna run their business right from their posts way up here on the rivers? Damn if the whole lot of you don’t got a free man hamstrung two ways of Sunday!”

“Like I said, maybeso you should think about coming to work for me,” Tullock said, grinning wryly.

Scratch held up his tin cup. “Like hell I will, Tullock. Your whiskey may be good, but Titus Bass ain’t never been a man to get cozy with honey-fugglers like Sublette or your parley-voo bosses.”

“Face it: fellas like you gonna be doing business with Sublette, or you’re dealing with American Fur—one or the other,” the trader warned.

“Maybe a nigger like me needs to take his pelts off down to Taos or Santy Fee.”

“What?” roared Tullock. “And have them Mex’cans take half your plews for Mex’can taxes? You think you’re
being savvy riding all the way down there to trade your furs off?”

Shrugging, Titus asked, “What’s a man to do when you Americans is driving up the price of trade goods and stomping down what my pelts bring?”

“I s’pose a man like you fights till he realizes he can’t fight no more.”

Bass stared at his whiskey for some time, watching its pale amber color shimmer in the light of the three flickering oil lamps Tullock had lit. Then he looked at Waits, how she clutched their daughter across her lap as the child lay sleeping, her tummy warm and full.

“Damn you all,” Scratch said with quiet dignity as he held up his cup in toast. “I may have to trade with your kind at ronnyvoo, but I don’t have to become one of you.”

“True, not yet,” Tullock admitted. “There’s still some ol’ throwbacks like you around.”

“Allays will be,” Bass claimed, taking another sip.

“Maybe, maybe not,” the trader argued. “Look what happened to Rocky Mountain Fur.”

Reluctantly, Titus had to agree. “Yeah, Sublette killed them too, didn’t he? Your booshways come in and scooped up the pieces.”

“Fitzpatrick—and Bridger hisself working for the company!” Tullock bellowed. “Can you believe that’d ever come to pass?”

“Why, I figger the company hamstrung Fitz and Gabe so bad, they was bamboozled into leading them company brigades. No matter, for them two niggers is still trapping beaver, by damned!”

“So here’s to them niggers what’re hanging on to the mountain trade with their fingernails!” and Tullock raised his cup.

Bass clinked his tin against the trader’s. “By bloody damn! Here’s to the sort what’ll never give up the high country. To hell with all your trading posts while there’s still flat-tails in the mountains!”

Waits-by-the-Water watched in rapt fascination as the blood oozed out of the wound in the trapper’s back where another white man delicately worked the point of his honed knife.

Surely the one wielding that instrument must be some sort of shaman, if for no other reason than the trapper he was cutting on sat there so calmly, without the slightest movement nor flinch, as the bloody knife scraped deeper and deeper into his upper back. There must be some magic that kept this terrible, painful ordeal from hurting!

From time to time she glanced up at her husband, to gauge his thoughts by the wondrous expression on his face as they stood among those hundreds of awestruck trappers and gaping Indians who stared transfixed, witnessing what truly had to be a powerful magic.

“I’ve had arrows pushed and pounded right out of me,” Bass whispered to her as that bare-backed trapper wrapped his whitened knuckles around a tent pole two others held upright for him. “But I never have seen anything like what’s being done to of Gabe right now.”

Waits repeated with growing proficiency in her English, “G-gabe?”

“Bridger. Jim Bridger.”

“Bri-ger,” she echoed, then asked him in her tongue, “You know Bri-ger?”

“Known him a long time. Good a man as they come. The sort I’d want at my back in a hard scrape.”

“Is this magic? This shaman cuts on Bri-ger and it doesn’t hurt?” she inquired, picking Magpie up from the ground to put the girl astraddle her hip.

“Naw,” he answered. “Bridger’s just taking it bravely. Look there at his teeth—see how he’s biting down on a thick chunk of rawhide real hard.”

“So the cutter is not a medicine man among the whites?”

With a grin Titus brushed a little of Magpie’s brownish hair from the girl’s eyes. “Yes, the cutter’s a medicine man. A shaman who does his work with knives, sometimes mixing up potions to drink like a Crow medicine man will do.”

Still confused, she asked, “No magic?”

He chuckled softly as he took Magpie from her arms and hoisted the girl onto his shoulders where she settled high above the attentive crowd. “No magic. Just Bridger’s cast-iron will.”

The white shaman wiped a damp cloth across the trapper’s back, smearing the glistening blood from the edges of the wound.

“All this, to pull out the Blackfoot arrowhead,” she observed wryly, wagging her head.

Bass had come to fetch her late that morning. When he sprinted into their camp, he was flush with excitement as he told her she must grab Magpie and mount up, to follow him back to the big camp because there was about to occur something he wanted her very much to see. By the time they reached the two huge awnings that were stretched overhead in the cottonwood trees near the bank of New Fork as it meandered toward its junction with the Green River, a boisterous crowd of white men were already encircling that shady spot they were keeping open,
holding back those curious members of the Ute and Shoshone who were joining the Nez Perce of Tai-quin-watish and Insala’s Flathead who had come to witness this magic.

Two tall, muscular trappers trudged in with a thick section of a cottonwood trunk and pitched it onto the grass in the middle of the open ground. Bass had called out to one of the two, saying his name was Meek after the man waved to her husband. By then four men had moved toward the log where the one called Bri-ger settled and removed his faded cloth shirt. As a pair of trappers set a tall shaved pole near Bridger’s feet, the fourth man began to probe with a finger at a spot between Bridger’s shoulder blade and his backbone.

Then the medicine man waved another out of the crowd, a trapper carrying a small iron kettle filled with water that steamed even as the day’s temperature continued to rise. From it the shaman extracted a short-bladed knife, flung off the excess water, then asked something of Bridger who sat hunched over below him.

When the trapper shoved that piece of rawhide between his teeth, then gripped both hands around the tent pole, the medicine man laid the point of his knife against a particular spot on Bridger’s back and made his first cut—a gesture that caused every one of the hundreds of onlookers to fall silent at that very instant, the entire circle of them craning their necks forward.

From time to time the medicine man and the trapper shared a few words; then the knife continued its work.

And now the medicine man inched around in front of Bridger, kneeling so he could peer closely into the trapper’s eyes, and began to speak as his bloody hands appeared to make signs.

“What is he signing?” she asked her husband in that expectant hush of the crowd.

“He isn’t signing,” Titus explained. “Just telling Bridger that the arrow point he’s digging for is stuck deep, buried in the bone.”

She swallowed hard, vividly picturing that—having seen enough of the iron arrowheads that had wedged and
embedded themselves into the thick bones of the buffalo her people hunted through the seasons.

“He says the tip of the arrow is bent, stuck in Bridger’s back,” Scratch continued. “And Bridger just said he figures that’s why they couldn’t get the arrowhead out three years ago.”

“Three years,” she repeated, transfixed on the medicine man’s hands as he crooked a finger, describing something to the trapper.

“The medicine man is telling Bridger it’s gonna be even harder to get the arrowhead out than he first thought.”

“Why?” She gazed up to pat her daughter’s hand before she stared back at the doctor who was getting to his feet and returning to his work at the trapper’s back.

“Can’t think of the Crow words for it—but there’s some new bone what’s growed around the arrowhead,” he explained, stabbing a single finger on one hand between two other tight fingers to show her.

Waits nodded in understanding. “Three years the bone has grown around the arrow, yes.”

With Bridger chomping his teeth on the chunk of rawhide as never before, the medicine man pressed on with his cutting, delicately working the tip of his knife down and around the wound that was freely flowing now. Then, by slicing sideways and prying slightly, after agonizing minutes of torture the medicine man pulled from the wound a dark, glistening object he immediately held up at the end of his arm.

Her husband and the others instantly hooted and hollered, screeched and whistled, as Bridger shuddered, huffing deeply after he spit out the thick slab of rawhide. He grumbled at the medicine man who stepped to the trapper’s knee and handed the bloody object to the bleeding man.

“Goddamn, if that ain’t some!” Bridger commented quietly, as if much of his strength had just been tested.

“Damn right!” the one named Meek roared as he lunged over to slap the medicine man on the back, then
held up the shaman’s bloody arm while the trappers went wild again with their whooping and shrill Indian calls.

“That was ’bout as slick as warm buff tallow!” her husband bellowed at those old friends of his who stood nearby, these trappers he had traveled the high places with in years gone by before he had chosen to journey the mountains and plains with her.

Now he turned to her quickly, chuckling, his eyes filled with wonder, his face lit with exuberance as he said, “A friend just told me that medicine man is named Whitman. He’s one who reads the book of God.”

“A holy man, yes,” she said, finding it made perfect sense for a true holy man to possess such remarkable healing powers. Among her people the spiritual men healed the physical body.

Bass whispered to her, “The knife cutter just told Bridger he is amazed the arrowhead didn’t cause more trouble in the last three winters … but Bridger claimed his back only hurt when the winter cold was deep and long.”

“Just as your wounds hurt you a little more with every winter?”

“As long as I have your fire to warm me, woman—I’ll never mind the coming winters,” he told her, gathering Waits beneath his arm.

As she gazed up to smile at Magpie, four of her husband’s old friends pierced the crowd that was breaking up and stopped around them. She recognized a few of those words they spoke back and forth as the white men looked upon Magpie with smiles of admiration, touching the girl’s dusty feet or rubbing her bare arm as they cooed at her and jabbered with her husband.

Bass slipped the child from his shoulders and saddled her on his hip. Cupping her chin in his hand, he asked Magpie in Crow, “You want to come with me to visit my friends?”

Then it sounded as if he asked the same thing in the white man’s tongue.

“I don’t think she understands me,” Bass sighed.

“One day soon she will understand what we say,”
Waits explained, taking the child into her arms. She watched her husband turn away and dig among his things in search of something. “And when she gets older, I hope she will know just how special she is to learn two languages while she is still a child.”

From a rawhide pouch Titus pulled a greasy deck of cards tied with a narrow whang cut from his legging fringe, and said, “With these, sweet woman—I just might win something extra from my old friends in a game of chance.”

“Chance? Like the game of hand my people play?”

“Just like it,” and he bent to kiss her. “Wish me your luck so I can bring back a present for you and one for little Magpie too.”

“Just bring yourself back, husband,” she said with laughter lighting her eyes. “And I will give you a present beneath the blankets tonight.”

He kissed her again. “Do you realize how special you are? To let your husband go off to gamble with his friends?”