Ride the Moon Down (44 page)

Not trusting the Blackfoot any farther than he could throw one, Jim Bridger had his brigade maintain their vigilant watch across the next three days, wary that the enemy would lay a trap for the unsuspecting whites. Then, on the fourth day, Bridger called for a small detachment of volunteers to venture from their breastworks and reconnoiter the surrounding countryside for sign of the war party.

Joe Meek, Kit Carson, and the others returned at twilight to report they hadn’t seen a warrior. But what they had found sure made them grateful those northern lights had spooked the Blackfoot.

“Joe’s the one with some proper learning, so he ciphered it out,” Carson explained. “When we come across all them war lodges that bunch had downriver, we could make out how each one was big enough to hold least ten men. Meek went to counting straightaway … and he tallied up enough of them timber lodges to make for twelve hunnert warriors!”

But for that deserted encampment of conical brush, branch, and log shelters, there wasn’t another sign of the Blackfoot. Six days after the enemy had abandoned the
country, Bridger’s brigade crossed the Yellowstone at the mouth of Clark’s Fork and started east. Bass marched with them those first few days until they reached Pryor Creek where he hailed his farewells. The sixty-one would push east for the Bighorn with plans to hunt buffalo while Scratch turned Samantha downstream to look for the Crow camp, anxious to rejoin his family.

That spring, after caching their winter goods, Scratch took Waits-by-the-Water, Magpie, and the infant boy north for the Musselshell country where the beaver grew sleek, their pelts much darker than anywhere to the south. At the site where he had been mauled by a sow grizzly seven years before, Bass sat beside the river with his family and the old dog, burned some sage and sweetgrass in a small fire at their feet, then smoked his pipe while the boy nursed in his mother’s arms. Here in this place, with the sleepy child’s tummy filled, Titus decided the time had come for him to name his son.

“For a long, long time,” he told Magpie, who sat in his lap, “I thought I should name your little brother isappe.”

“Woodtick?” his wife asked, looking up as she removed her glistening nipple from the sleeping child’s mouth.

Bass grinned as he looked up at his wife, nodding. “Isn’t he always sucking at you? Just the way a fat little tick sucks blood till he’s so full he falls right off to wait for another deer to walk past.”

Magpie looked closely at her baby brother as he slept, then watched as Waits slipped her breast back inside her dress. With a giggle she looked back at her sleeping brother. “Woodtick. That is a good name, popo.”

“But I will not give him that name,” Scratch corrected, resetting her on one of his knees as Zeke laid his chin on Bass’s other leg. “Next, I thought he should be named for a bird—just like his sister.”

“Yes!” Magpie cried exuberantly. “What bird?”

“Ischi’kiia,” he replied. “Snowbird.”

Waits smiled. “You thought of this because he is our winter baby?”

“Yes,” Scratch declared. “For a long time I thought it would be good to name our children for birds—because they are about as free as any animal I know.”

But Waits asked, “You don’t want to call him Snowbird?”

“No.” Titus wagged his head. “Later I finally figured out our son should have a name that wouldn’t cause other children to make fun of him when he grows a little bigger and starts to play with other youngsters in the Crow village. For a boy, better that it be a strong name.”

“What did you decide for him?” his wife asked.

“Bish’kish’pee
,” he replied.

Waits gazed down at their son. “Little Flea?”

“Look at him,” he explained. “See how he clings to you, just like a flea clings to a dog.”

“That is what every child does to its mother,” Waits explained.

Then Scratch continued. “When Flea gets old enough to understand, I want to give him a white name.”

Magpie looked up into her father’s face and asked, “Why do that?”

“I want to give my children the sort of name a white child would have.”

The girl scrambled to her feet there before him, taking some of his beard in each of her tiny hands and holding her face close to his. “Are you going to give me a white name too?”

“I thought I would, one day when you grow bigger, Magpie,” he confirmed. “But I won’t if you are still happy with your Crow name.”

She thought about that for a while, then said, “No. I like Magpie. It feels like it should be my name. Maybe when I am older, you can give me a white name. But while I am a little girl, I am Magpie.”

He grinned. “That’s just how I feel about it too.” And gave her a squeeze. “Go sit with your mother.”

When he took the boy in his arms and Magpie settled in her mother’s lap, Titus said a prayer for them all, asking for a special blessing on the child he was giving the name Flea. When he was done with that simple ceremony, Bass
was content to hold the sleeping child across his arms as the air warmed that late afternoon, birds chirping in the budding branches overhead.

After sitting in the exquisite silence for a long time, her daughter dozing in her lap, Waits asked, “Do you think Magpie will marry a white man?”

“In many ways, I hope she doesn’t,” he eventually admitted.

“But my life with you has been very good,” Waits declared. “If I had married a Crow man, I would not travel as far as I have, nor would I see anywhere near as much as I do with you.”

“Doesn’t it make your life harder to stay on the move with your white husband?”

She grinned and shook her head. “No—life would be much, much harder with a Crow husband. A white man takes care of his wife much better, and he treats his woman much better too.”

“Then you hope Magpie finds a white man to marry?”

Nodding, Waits said, “Not just any white man. If she can find a man as good as her father, then I want her to marry him.”

Aroused from her brief nap, the little girl stretched, then toddled over to her father and clasped her arms around one of his. “Maybe you marry me when I grow up, popo?”

He laughed a little and hugged her close. “I can’t marry you because I am your father. But I can make sure that the man who does marry you will treat you just as good as I treat your mother.”

“Then I won’t marry anyone. I will always live with you and my mother,” Magpie vowed.

Bass grinned at Waits. “Maybe you should tell our daughter that there will come a day when she will be very anxious to leave us so she can go live with a young man.”

“There is no sense in explaining that to her anytime soon, bu’a,” she replied with a grin. “Soon enough your daughter will find out about men all on her own.”

Marching south from the Musselshell after a successful spring hunt, they recrossed the Yellowstone early that
summer, hurrying through the lengthening days, putting every mile they could behind them, riding from dawn’s first light until dusk forced them to stop for the night. Striking the Bighorn, they continued on down the Wind River to swing around the far end of the mountains where they crossed the Southern Pass. On its western slope they struck New Fork, following it to its mouth, then turned north on the Green to reach Horse Creek, site of that summer’s rendezvous.

From the high benchland he could see that the Nez Perce were already there, their village raised in a horseshoe bend of the twisting creek beyond the scattered camps of company and free men.

“Where are the many?” Waits asked.

“Didn’t figger us for coming in early,” he told her in English, his eyes narrowing with concern. “Trader ain’t come in yet neither.”

“I am tired of the long journey,” she told him. “We’ll stay awhile. Wait for the trader.”

“Yes,” he said, relieved to know she wasn’t impatient after the long journey. “I promised you a new copper kettle. We’ll wait for the trade goods.”

Beyond the first few camps of free men, he ran across the sprawling settlement of lean-tos and blanket bowers where the company men sat out these midsummer days, watching the east for signs of the caravan. Just beyond Bridger’s brigade Bass found a small copse of trees that would do while they joined the wait. After a day occupied with setting up their shelters and dragging in some wood from down the valley, he spent a morning untying the rawhide whangs from his packs of fur, dusting and combing each pelt for vermin, then carefully repacking them until it came time for the St. Louis men to attach a value to his year’s labor.

By afternoon it was time to ride over to look up those friends who had shared a cold winter siege with him along the Yellowstone. Zeke settled in the shade with him as Kit Carson, Joe Meek, Shad Sweete, and others came up to have themselves some palaver and a little of what whiskey remained in the American Fur Company kegs.

“Jehoshaphat!” Bass growled as his cup was filled, looking round at those company trappers who hadn’t been with Bridger’s men last winter on the Yellowstone. “If the sight of them Blackfoot skedaddling wasn’t call for ol’ Gabe to pour out a extra ration of Pratte and Chouteau’s whiskey!”

Holding the small keg beneath one arm and doing the pouring now, Sweete added, “Damn me, boys—but this child won’t ever again have me cause to get likkered up on one poor cup!”

The two of them were holding court there beside the Green River that hot July day, eighteen and thirty-seven, telling and retelling the tale of that just-about battle with those Blackfoot some twelve hundred strong. One bunch after another of Andrew Drips’s brigade showed up to hear the story of when one white man’s bony rump turned back the biggest war party ever heard tell of in the mountains.

“More Injuns than ever these eyes see’d in one place,” Bridger testified.

One of Drips’s trappers regarded Bass warily, demanding, “You really the one showed his arse and made them Blackfeets run away?”

Before Titus could reply, Shad slammed a hand down on Scratch’s shoulder, sloshing some whiskey as he answered for Bass. “Just the sight of this coon’s arse turned them niggers’ hearts to water!”

Nearly every one of those doubters who came to hear the story looked Bass up and down, plainly struggling to believe the tale because Scratch wasn’t near so tall, nor anywhere as big, as Meek or Sweete. And besides—Titus was a damned sight older than every other trapper most knew out there in the mountains. The skeptical listeners clearly had trouble believing the story … until Carson or Meek, Sweete or Bridger, told them about those northern lights and that terrifying crimson sky.

A legend was a’borning—but all the more a tale about that frightening celestial display than a tale about one man pulling aside his breechclout to insult the enemy.

“Gabe!”

The whole bunch turned with that cry of alarm from Meek. Joe stood just beyond the circle of their shelters at the edge of the prairie, pulling a looking glass from his eye. More than a hundred men fell silent in a blink. That tone of warning and danger in the big man’s voice damn well didn’t belong at rendezvous. Here they came to relax among companions and friendlies. But those who remembered the deadly battle in Pierre’s Hole knew how quickly a summer’s tranquil stillness could be’ shattered.

“It’s them Bannocks again!” another man cried.

“Bannawks?” Grabbing Sweete by the arm, Bass demanded, “What’s going on?”

On Shad’s face was a look of murderous determination. “Trouble. You bring your gun?”

“Right over there. But I didn’t figger I’d ever—”

Bridger interrupted everything with his bellow. “Where them Nez Perce?”

“Over here!” George Ebbert answered.

“Keep ’em outta sight, Squire,” Bridger ordered. Turning round to the rest, he commanded, “Lick your flints and prime your pans, boys. This can’t be no social call.”

Not with the way those three dozen Bannock warriors were coming on at the gallop.

Unlike the rest of the suspicious trappers, Scratch kept expecting the horsemen to raise their rifles into the air, firing them in that universal sign of friendship upon approaching a camp.

“This ain’t gonna be good, Shad,” Bass said as he eased up beside the taller man. He quickly licked the pad of his thumb, ran it along the underside of the flint in the gun’s hammer to swab it clean of burned powder smudge. “S’pose you tell me what lit a fire under their asses.”

“Few days a’fore the Nepercy village ever come in for ronnyvoo, six of ’em come on ahead of the rest to find out for sure where the white men was camped. Them Bannocks already had their village on up Horse Crik, and some of their men run onto the Nepercy,” Shad began. “So those Bannocks up and took the Nepercy horses and most everything else they had too.”

“Even though both tribes was coming in to ronnyvoo?”

“Damn right,” Shad replied sourly. “Put afoot, them six run on in here, asking us to protect ’em till their village got here. Fact be, while we was making our own way here, we heard this same bunch of Bannock bastards been doing some thieving: raised some traps and plunder from some Frenchies working Bear River last month … so Gabe was more’n happy to help out them Nepercy.”

“How so?”

Sweete answered, “Them six Nepercy waited till dark a couple nights ago, then slipped off to the Bannock camp to see what they could do ’bout getting their ponies back. We didn’t see ’em till next morning when the six of ’em come in with their horses.”

“They’d stole ’em back from the Bannawks?”

Sweete nodded. “Damn right. I s’pose them Bannocks didn’t figger no one’d dare try, so most of the warriors was off hunting when the Nepercy stole their ponies back. Them Nepercy bucks rode right in here, told us to be ready for a fight with the Bannocks, and give the finest horse to Bridger hisself.”

“That was a stroke of medicine,” Bass said as the Bannock warriors neared the tree line. By now he could see the horsemen were painted. Not a good sign at all.

Seizing the halter of the Nez Perce gift horse, Bridger hollered, “Grab tight on your horses, boys! I’ll wager these buggers aim to run ’em off!”

With war screeches, snorting horses, and the slamming of hooves as they brought their ponies to a dusty halt, the horsemen careened into the trappers’ camp with bluster enough for twice their number. Two of their group waved their weapons, yelling at the rest, sending the warriors this way and that through the camp. Each one of the three dozen naked warriors bellowed threateningly, shaking his old fusil or bow or war club at the white men.