Ride the Moon Down (31 page)

The white men who had come to this Indian country to catch the beaver had either toughened themselves enough to survive, or they had died. Her husband explained how some of his kind had turned around and fled back to the land of the whites. Waits doubted these soft women raised inside their immobile lodges could endure a nomadic life lived outdoors through all seasons.

For now these two clearly seemed relieved to have reached this raucous white man’s gathering. Neither of them appeared to have any children, and it was pretty apparent that neither Narcissa nor the glowering one would have to raise a hand to do much of anything in caring for themselves. In fact, their hands weren’t soiled at all. Not the way dirt and soot permanently etched every knuckle and scored every wrinkle on Waits’s hands. No doubt these women didn’t know the first thing about graining a hide, chopping wood, or removing the organs of an antelope without pricking the bladder or rupturing a bowel. These white women had men who leaped right in to do everything for them. With all those trappers fluttering
around like hummingbirds at a vine of sweet blossoms, it was no wonder these women didn’t know the first thing about taking care of themselves.

They didn’t have to.

The more Waits-by-the-Water watched the comings and goings in that camp, the more she decided it was a very, very good thing these women weren’t staying. Almost laughable, she thought, how these hardy, coarse men became such different creatures around their white women. Waits contented herself that the women were only passing through.

And she hoped the white men would bring no more of these soft creatures to this land.

For the first time since Bass could recollect, there were nearly as many free men come to rendezvous as there were company trappers. And a damned sight fewer of both camped this year near the mouth of Horse Creek.

Slightly more than a hundred Americans had come in with the Bridger and Drips brigades, along with no more than fifty Frenchmen between them. With the supply caravan, Tom Fitzpatrick brought in another seventy hands to wrangle more than four hundred horses and pack mules, but the lion’s share of those men would be turning right around for the States once the beaver was all bought up.

At Fort Laramie, Fitzpatrick had abandoned the long train of wagons, packing everything they couldn’t fit into nineteen two-wheeled carts onto the backs of their mules for that last leg of the journey over the Southern Pass and on to Green River. Milton Sublette, courageously recovering from the recent amputation of his leg, bounced all the way into rendezvous in one of those carts. Before he slid to the ground, Milt strapped on the cork leg purchased for him in Philadelphia by Hugh Campbell, Robert’s brother.

It brought some hot moisture to Bass’s eyes to watch that man, an unvarnished hero four years before at the Battle of Pierre’s Hole, now wobble and waver on that one good leg as old friends rushed up to hug and shake his hand as if it were a pump handle on a long-ago dried-up
well. Especially the tall, slab-shouldered Joe Meek and his Shoshone wife.

Titus remembered the story fondly told of this woman and the two inseparable friends. Seasons ago Umentucken, the Mountain Lamb, had married Milton Sublette, known as the “Thunderbolt of the Rockies.” Back in thirty-two she and their young child had been with Milt’s brigade that summer morning in Pierre’s Hole when they chanced to bump into a large band of Blackfoot.

Eventually Sublette’s leg refused to heal from an arrow wound his friends claimed was poisoned. Reluctantly deciding to return east to have the infection cared for, not knowing if he would ever return to the mountains, Milt gave his wife over to his best friend, Joe Meek. For the last few years Joe had cared for this beautiful woman, raising Milt’s child as he did his own.

Shyly now, the Lamb stepped out from behind her new husband and inched up to embrace Sublette.

Not one man there mentioned the tears they saw well in Milt’s eyes, or the way he bravely snorted and swiped at his nose as the crowd pounded on his back and gawked at his new cork leg.

“By damn!” Scratch roared. “You ever think you’d have one’a your legs make it to hell afore you!”

“Shit! Don’t matter I got only one good leg,” Sublette chortled, “I can still outrun the devil hisself!”

“That’s right, Scratch!” Bridger agreed. “With you and Meek galloping to keep ahead of the devil, Milt don’t have to worry none about running the fastest … he only, gotta be fast ’nough to stay ahead of
you
!”

“You figger I’m so slow, the devil gonna get his claws in me, eh?”

“Damn right he will, Bass!” Milton bawled with laughter.

“One of these days, mayhaps,” Scratch confessed with a grin. “But not till I’m so old and stove-up I can’t outrun him no more … and all you niggers are already there to greet me!”

By the following day Fitzpatrick’s hands had fixed up the largest of a handful of squat log structures first erected
a short distance from the Green by Captain Bonneville’s fur brigade back in the spring of 1832. Rather than hacking any windows in the crude eighteen-by-eighteen-foot square, the builders settled for what light streamed between the unchinked timbers or through the only entrance: a six-foot-wide, two-foot-high rectangle laid on its side some four feet off the ground. It was through this lone opening that furs were passed in and trade goods handed out, the better to protect against pilfering. For a roof Fitzpatrick’s Frenchmen had stretched some oiled sheeting across the timbers they laid overhead in an attempt to protect the valuable goods from those fickle summer storms known to visit this high valley.

All told, more than thirteen hundred Indians were in the valley to greet the incoming train. The Shoshone and Bannock had camped along Horse Creek, while up the Green near Bonneville’s Fort both the Flathead and Nez Perce had raised their lodges.

Moseying over to have himself a good look at the trade goods Fitzpatrick had packed out from St. Louis, Titus watched the man in fancy buckskins dismount from his showy white mule and walk up to shake hands with Bridger and Drips. Together the three of them ambled toward the awning where Milt Sublette sat in the shade.

“Who’s that in them foofaraw booshway clothes with all the red wool and blue beads?” Scratch asked of a familiar face who had turned from Bridger’s side and was walking his way.

“Name’s Joshua Pilcher,” the tall man said when he stopped beside Bass. “I hear he was on the upper Missouri with Lisa afore Ashley ever come west. When the Spaniard died, Pilcher took over Lisa’s company, and they did well till Immel and Jones got butchered by the Blackfoot in twenty-three. Drips and Fontenelle, even one of them Bent brothers, they all worked for Pilcher one time or other. Some time back I heard talk he offered the English up north he’d trap this side of the mountains for the Hudson’s Bay.”

Glaring at Pilcher, Bass grumbled, “On American territory?
That’d make him a traitor to his own country and his own kind!”

“The English turned him down, but a couple years back they made him agent on the upper Missouri for all these Injuns,” the big man declared.

“That what brung him here?” Scratch demanded. “Something to do with the Injuns out here?”

“Naw. Says he’s come here to buy out Bridger and the rest.”

“B-buy ’em out?” Scratch sputtered in surprise. “With whose plews?”

The tall man shrugged. “Sounds like it’s St. Louie French money.”

“Damn if that don’t take the circle.” Turning to stare up into the younger man’s eyes, Titus said, “I see’d your face at many a ronnyvoo, round some fires, over at the trade tents. But I don’t recollect I ever caught your name.”

“Shadrach Sweete,” the man replied. “And you’re Titus Bass.”

“How you know me?”

Sweete chuckled. “Hell, anyone runs with Jim Bridger’s brigade knows who Titus Bass is.”

“But I ain’t never trapped with Gabe.”

“Don’t matter,” Sweete replied. “I recollect how we run across you a time or two through the years. Ain’t that many of us been out here long as me or you have. ’Sides, Gabe thinks the world of you. Why, ever’ time he tells that story of you losing your ha’r, or how you run onto that red nigger years later … whoooeee! Them tales keep the greenhorns from sucking in a breath!”

They laughed together; then Scratch asked, “You figger Fitz got his whiskey kegs open yet?”

“I seen him crack ’em my own self,” Sweete said.

“You think my word be good as plews with Fitz?”

“Damn if it wouldn’t be better’n most.”

Bass slapped the tall man on the back. “Then, what say you, Shadrach—let’s you and me go have us a drink of that saddle varnish these traders claim is whiskey!”

Sweete struck him as a gentle man shoved down inside a grizzly bear’s body. A little taller than Joe Meek, and so
wide of shoulder too that Scratch wondered if he could lay a hickory ax handle across that broad beam with no hickory left to hang off at either end.

“Just like you, I come to the mountains myself in twenty-five,” Bass replied as one of the clerks poured out the whiskey into a pair of brand-new tin cups.

“But I bet you wasn’t no fourteen-year-ol’t pup like I was in twenty-five!”

Astonished by that admission, Titus asked, “How the hell you hire on with Gen’l Ashley when you was fourteen?”

“Just lookit me, you cross-eyed idjit!” Sweete bellowed with a disarming smile, standing back to spread his arms. “Even as a pup—I was big for my age!”

“You’re still a goddamned pup!” Titus growled at the man who stood a good half foot taller than he did and nudged something just shy of three hundred pounds.

After a long moment of quiet Sweete sighed. “Where’s the beaver gone, Scratch?”

He looked at the big man, then took another sip of his whiskey. “There’s beaver still, Shad. Up high. Back in a ways where no man’s yet gone. There’s beaver.”

“They say the easy beaver’s been caught,” Sweete agreed. “Ah, shit—we’re on the downside of our trade, what with folks back east wanting silk hats.”

“Beaver’s bound to rise, Shad,” he said with more hope than he felt. “Bound to rise.”

“If it don’t—what the hell’m I gonna do?” the big man asked. “I come to trap beaver when I was fourteen. What the hell’m I s’posed to do when I can’t make a living no more trapping beaver?”

“Let them others get all lathered up, run on back to what you run away from,” Bass said. “They just leave more beaver for niggers like you and me!”

At the sharp ring of the voice they both turned and squinted into the sunlight washing over everything beyond that shady copse of trees. A lone rider galloped up, shouting.

“The Nepercy! They’re fixing to come over with a parade!” the man huffed as the distant sound of drums
first reached them. “Gonna show off front of them white women!”

“I’ll bet that’ll be some!” Bass exclaimed, bolting to his feet and swilling down the last of his whiskey before handing the empty tin to Sweete. “Be off to fetch my wife and girl so they can see.”

Zeke was straining at the end of his rope the moment Titus and his horse hoved into sight, yipping and prancing side to side, his big tail whipping mightily at the return of his master.

“You’re gonna have to see this!” Scratch called as he kicked his right leg over and landed on both feet.

He knelt as Magpie lumbered up toward him, clenching a well-moistened strip of dried meat she had been sucking on in one hand. He swept her into his arms and turned to his wife. “C’mon. Get your pony.”

“Where are we going in such a hurry?”

“Bet Magpie’s never see’d the Nepercy strut like prairie cocks. Likely you ain’t either.”

He positioned the girl in front of the saddle before he stuffed a left foot into the stirrup and swung his leg over, settling her onto his lap as he came down into the saddle. “Here,” he said to his daughter, wrapping her tiny hands around the thick látigo leather. “You hol’t on to the reins with me.”

Waits came up beside them, leading her pony. When she had leaped onto its bare back, she asked, “Why are the Pierced Noses making a procession?”

“They want to show off for the white women.”

He watched how that suddenly soured the expression on her face.

“For the white women,” she repeated. “Now the Pierced Noses are gone strange in the head for the white women.”

Titus leaned over and gripped her forearm sympathetically. “Don’t think nothing of it. Just wanted you and Magpie to see the show.”

For a moment Waits gazed at her daughter’s cheerful face, then said, “Yes. Let’s go see the show these Pierced Noses put on for the white women.”

As it turned out, all four tribes eagerly joined in the grand procession as it worked its way toward the site where the missionary women were camped. By the time Scratch and Waits dismounted and tied off their ponies, the front ranks of the march were approaching. Having started their ride at the west end of the valley, the Snake and Bannock passed through the Flathead camp, then the Nez Perce village, sweeping up more and more participants until some four hundred yelling, chanting, shrieking warriors boiled up and down the sides of the parade column.

Stripped as if for the hunt, they wore no more than their breechclout and moccasins, many painted with vivid colors, tying birds and feathers in their hair, wearing the skullcaps of wolves, badgers, even buffalo upon their heads. Shaking lances strewn with the scalp locks taken from vanquished enemies, the horsemen strutted as proudly as any war hero might. Old men rode stately at the center of the march, singing their battle songs as they beat on hand drums or shook buffalo-bladder rattles filled with stream-bottom pebbles. Younger men who had taken no scalps brandished their bows or war clubs or fusils, to which they had tied long strips of red and blue cloth to flutter in the summer breeze.

Within a nearby copse of trees, Captain William Drummond Stewart and Bridger assured Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding that this noisy, bellicose charge was every bit as harmless as the charge made on them by the trappers racing out to meet the caravan. Both wives appeared at the flaps of their tall conical tent sewn of bed ticking and large enough to comfortably sleep all seven of the missionaries. But the moment pale and sickly Eliza Spalding spied the approach of the screaming warriors, she emitted a pained yelp, slapped a hand over her mouth, and turned on her heel—disappearing back into the sanctuary of her tent.