Ride the Moon Down (35 page)

The most significant transaction there on the banks of the Green River was not the trading of furs for sugar and coffee, powder and lead, but that sale of Fontenelle, Fitzpatrick & Company to Joshua Pilcher, agent for Pratte, Chouteau &c Company. With no more than a whimper the grand and raucous rivalry that had raged between competing outfits was now a thing of the past.

A new American Fur Company had won the pot. But while those wealthy St. Louis Frenchmen might have defeated their less-well-heeled American competitors, Pratte, Chouteau &c Company still did not have the fur country to themselves. With Hudson’s Bay continuing to skulk around the edges, this business of beaver pelts was bound to be not only a competition between two companies, but a sharpening of the rivalry between two countries.

While Andrew Drips once again led a small brigade south by west past the Snake River country for the Wasatch and Uintah ranges, Lucien Fontenelle departed with Kit Carson and some thirty men for a fall hunt on the Musselshell, intending to winter on the lower Powder, a favorite with trappers because of its protection from the
winter winds and the numbers of buffalo that grazed there throughout the cold months.

“Due north, where we’ll stab our way into the gut of Blackfoot country again.” Thus Sweete explained where Bridger’s brigade was heading as he held out his hand, preparing to move out at first light that late July morning.

“Got us plenty of time to trap a’fore we winter somewheres over on the Yellowstone,” Jim Bridger added as Bass shook their hands in farewell.

Scratch embraced his old friend. “You boys gonna watch your ha’r up there in the land of Bug’s Boys, ain’t you, Gabe? Maybe we’ll run on you come winter. Spring at the latest.”

“You’ll be up north too?” Sweete asked.

With a nod Bass said, “Fixing to winter on the Yallerstone with my wife’s people. Crow, they are. We lost her pap to the Blackfoot two year ago. Time we got back up there to see to her mam.”

Bridger glanced at Cora who sat atop her pony nearby. “Reckon I know how your stick floats when it comes to your wife’s family. Many don’t just marry a woman.”

“He ends up hitching hisself to all her kin,” Titus concluded. “It’s a good thing too, Jim—what with that doctor’s wife gone to Oregon now. Shiny-eyed gal like that being around just naturally made my woman jealous. Yours too.”

“What? My Cora?”

“Yep. Reason I know is, my wife had a good talk with me—worried all sorts of white gals was coming west and I wouldn’t want her no more,” he explained, watching Bridger turn to stare at Cora.

“I had me no idee I done anything to make her worry.”

“She’s carrying your child now, Gabe.”

Jim nodded and said, “So I made her worry I was gonna leave her high and dry with a young’un?”

“Take it from a feller what has one pup and ’nother on the way—carrying a child makes a woman act like she was bit by the full moon for no reason at all. Best for you
just to figger she’s gonna bawl at nothing, scream at you for nothing too.”

Grinning, Jim commented, “I know my way round the mountains, know a Blackfoot mokerson from a Crow, know when to fight the niggers and when to run … and damn if I ain’t a fool to think I knowed women too!”

“At times, Gabe—there be no sign writ on a woman’s heart, so it’s for us to find out for our own selves.”

“Thankee, Scratch,” Bridger added, shaking Bass’s hand again before he turned, swung into the saddle, and waved his arm as he hollered for his brigade to mount up.

“Time for the trail,” Sweete said as he crawled atop the strong, jug-headed Indian pony, the man’s legs so long they all but brushed the tops of the meadow grass as he reined away for the column starting out of the valley.

Titus waved, crying out, “See you boys on the Yallerstone!”

Some of the finest moments in his life were spent sitting on a hillside such as this, listening to autumn pass with such a hush that most folks simply weren’t aware of its journey across the face of time until winter had them in its grip.

Now that summer was done, every few days Titus dawdled among the shimmering quakies, leaning back against a tree trunk there in the midst of their spun-gold magnificence to gaze out upon the valley below where he ran his trapline. Since leaving rendezvous, he had keenly anticipated this season of the year, this season of his life.

The quiet murmur of the land as it prepared for a winter’s rest. The frantic coupling of the wild creatures big and small before the coming of cold and hunger. That soul-stirring squeal of the bull elk on the hillside above him. Those heart-wrenching honks of the long-necks as they flapped overhead, making for the south once again to complete a grand circuit of the ages.

As he sat there today, gazing down at how the wind stirred tiny riffles across the surface of the stream, Scratch
remembered the ancient Flathead medicine man who had died early that July morning his village was preparing to depart the white man’s rendezvous. Only the day before the old man’s death had Bass gone to the Flathead camp with Bridger, Sweete, and Meek, who had come along with Cora to visit some of her kinfolk to have a divination, a portent of their autumn hunt.

The ancient one unexpectedly called the trappers to his shady bower where he lay suspended on his travois of soft blankets and robes beneath a buffalo-hide awning. His daughter, old herself, remained at his side.

“My father wants to talk to you,” the widow had explained, looking up at Bridger, then the others, with tired eyes.

“Who is your father?” Sweete asked in sign.

And Bridger inquired with his hands, “Why does he want to talk to me?”

“Come,” she gestured. “He will tell you everything.”

The old man reached out a frail, bony hand, looking more like a bird’s claw, the moment he heard his daughter return, heard the trappers shuffle up and position themselves self-consciously around the travois.

“Touch his hand,” she signed, rubbing the back of hers with her fingers. “So he knows you are here.”

Bridger knelt and rubbed the back of the ancient one’s veiny hand. Then Scratch touched it, amazed at how the dark cords stood out like tiny ropes against the sheen of the malleable brown skin.

“Does he hear?” Bass said, then remembered to make the sign.

The woman nodded and laid a hand on her father’s cheek, spoke to him softly in Flathead.

When he began speaking, it was only a few words at a time, almost as if he was having to fight for breath between each phrase. And when he sighed, resting, the old woman translated with her hands.

“He says to you: it is good that you come to listen—you leaders of the white men who are strangers to this land,” she signed.

“Many long winters ago when I was a boy, I remember the seasons as good. Then the first white men arrived.

“Your kind came to our country as no wild creature ever came to our villages before. And we did not understand.

“The white man did not stay at the edges of our camps like other creatures, but he came straight into our village. He ate the beaver and all the animals in our mountains with his iron teeth.

“Because the white man has such a great appetite for everything in our country, now my grandchildren and great-grandchildren are hungry.”

While the old woman signed these last words, her ancient father wiped his watery eyes and clutched a tiny tortoiseshell rattle against his chest as if he had finished. Sweete, Bridger, Bass, and Meek began to rise—but the daughter motioned them to remain.

“Do not think my father is done. So tired is he with his years, he only needs a little rest now.”

For a long time the soft, wrinkled eyelids remained closed in that gray-skinned, skeletal face. Then, just when Scratch was growing restless, the medicine man finally spoke again, in even more of a whisper this time, his voice grown all the weaker. Eventually the daughter turned her attention from him to the white men and made sign.

“If the mountain lion or the great silver bear ever came to our villages the way the white men have … the lion or bear goes down under our arrows and lances.

“But the eye spirits in my dreams tell me we do not have enough arrows and lances for the many white creatures who have come boldly into our country, you who do not stay on the edges of our camps. My dreams tell me we can never kill all of those wild white creatures who have come to change things forever.

“We do not understand,” she translated into sign. “Once we were masters in our land. Now we are hungry, and afraid. Above us in our skies, the sun has set on our faces. Night has forever fallen across our land … never again will we ride the moon down.”

As if she knew he must be thirsty from all the talk,
weary from all the effort, the old woman gave her father some water from a horn ladle, then settled at his elbow where she made sign.

“He is done. All done, what he wants to say to you. Farewell.”

The next morning the ancient seer was dead. Chances were good that his last words were spoken to some white men he believed were chiefs among their people. While Meek, Newell, and Sweete had joked with Bridger on their way back to camp about Gabe’s being a chief among the trappers, Bass wondered instead why the old man hadn’t sent for the rich or the noble, the holy or the powerful, among the white booshways and traders, sportsmen, and missionaries camped along the Green River.

Perhaps the old man had no desire to talk to the loftier sort who had never truly penetrated to the heart of the mountains. Maybe he wanted more so to speak to those who had trapped and crossed his land, those who had invaded and thereby changed life as his people had known it.

Funny—until this moment Scratch hadn’t remembered the old rattle shaker. But now, here among the glittering but dying yellow leaves, watching the rhythms of death slowly overcome the seasons of life, he suddenly imagined that the old man and his people were very much like the beaver. Unlike those tiny worms said to spin their threads of silk for hats, the beaver had to be sacrificed for others to reap their harvest. A man took the hide and discarded the rest.

The rattle shaker must have figured the trappers had come to his country to take what they wanted in the way of furs and women, discarding everything else when they moved on. Perhaps his people were like the beaver.

So the old man’s dream began to disturb him in that season of dying before the onset of winter—a terrifying vision of perpetual night that held no hope of a moonset, no prayer that any of them could ride the moon down and bring about the coming of day.

This autumn, more than any before, Scratch sensed the cold stab him to the marrow.

“What the hell’s a man call this godforsaken place of yours, trader?” Bass roared as he ushered his wife through the narrow doorway cut into the clay-chinked cottonwood logs and threw his shoulder back against the crude door planks to batten it against the wind.

Samuel Tullock looked up from the floor where he was sorting through some buffalo robes a handful of Crow warriors had brought in. All six of them stood to peer at the new arrivals.

“That you, Bass?”

Tearing the bulky coyote hat from his head, Scratch slapped the fur against the tail of his elk-hide coat, knocking loose a cloud of snowflakes. Despite the best efforts of the stone fireplace at the corner of the small trading room erected there on the north bank of the Yellowstone opposite the mouth of the Tongue River, their every breath was a greasy vapor in the winter air.

Tullock stepped around the warriors and that scatter of robes as Waits-by-the-Water set Magpie on the floor of pounded earth. As soon as she pulled back the deep hood of her blanket capote, three of the warriors instantly recognized her. She settled onto a small wooden crate, tearing at the knot in the sash around her waist. Bass held out his hand to the trader.

Tullock shook with him, affectionately laying his frozen club of a left hand on Titus’s forearm. “I ain’t seen a white face in weeks.”

“Down to ronnyvoo, one of them brigades made plans to spend the winter over on the Powder,” Titus explained as he tore open his heavy coat and dragged it from his arms. “Figgered they’d been through here a’fore now on their way to winter camp.”

Tullock shook his head and took a step back. With a sigh the former trapper said, “Good to see a white man every now and then. Likely them company boys come through eventual’, if’n they’re in this country. Coffee?”

“Some for both of us, thankee.” Scratch watched the trader turn and step around the pile of robes, moving behind the group of warriors who had stepped over to chatter
with Waits. He caught every third word or so, fast as they were talking—happy and animated. It made his heart glad to see such a smile on her face, hear that cheer in her voice. Back among her own kind.

“Trading been good?” he asked as Tullock handed a cup down to Waits, passed a second to Titus.

“Spring was a mite slow,” he admitted. “But it’s been picking up here of late now that the cold has come for certain.”

“So you ain’t been hurt none closing down your old place and moving over here?”

“Near as I can tell, these fellas say their people gonna bring in their furs no matter what.”