Ride the Moon Down (60 page)

Shaking his head, Scratch explained, “We did not bring my family. The Blackfoot captured them in my camp. The enemy took them from me. He-Who-Has-Been-Killed decided to die in battle against the Blackfoot instead of letting the sickness kill him.”

“This camp is not clean?” Pretty On Top observed nervously.

“No,” and Bass shook his head. “You and your warriors
must stay over here, upwind of the sickness and the enemies.”

As the warriors dismounted, Stiff Arm and Pretty On Top reminded them that the Blackfoot were infected. There would be no hacking apart the enemy this day. In silence the thirty-two assembled some distance from Waits-by-the-Water while she finished binding Strikes-in-Camp’s body within a blanket and a buffalo robe for the journey back to his village. As Magpie sat talking with Flea, Bass stripped weapons from the Blackfoot, claiming all the firearms, knives, and tomahawks for himself. Bows and quivers he carried over to the war party, dropping the weapons on the crusty snow for the Crow to argue over.

Later, Pretty On Top called the trapper to return to the group. “Ti-Tuzz, none of these men want the Blackfoot weapons.”

“They are afraid of the sickness?”

“Yes. Keep them for yourself.”

Shaking his head, Bass replied, “I don’t want the bows. Don’t want nothing else—no clothes, no coats or blankets. I will burn them.”

Stiff Arm asked, “Will the flames kill the sickness on them?”

“I can only pray it will.”

While the restless, frightened warriors huddled upwind of the Blackfoot bodies, Scratch inspected what baggage the enemy war party had along, searching for what had been stolen from him. A half dozen of his Mexican traps and most of his beaver, along with a good supply of tacks, lead and powder, coffee, ribbon and beads. Not everything, but enough discovered among the dead to confirm they had already divided what they had plundered from his camp at the time they kidnapped Waits and Magpie.

While Stiff Arm’s warriors started fires and ate at the edge of the clearing, the white man finished saddling and packing his animals for the return journey across the pass. Over the back of the dead man’s prized war pony Bass tied Strikes’s body. Hoisting Magpie into Pretty On Top’s lap for the first leg of the trip back across the mountain,
Scratch took the blanket cocoon from Waits, helped his wife to her feet, then followed her slowly to her pony. There she seized the tall pommel, preparing to climb into the saddle, but instead gasped as if struggling to catch her breath.

“C-carry the child w-with you,” she whispered, her voice low and raspy. “I am v-very … tired.”

He watched her wearily pull herself into the saddle, then her eyes smiled weakly at him. He knew she had to be exhausted from her harrowing ordeal. Bass turned with Flea’s blanket and robe cradle across his arm, starting for his pony when Magpie screamed in fear and the warriors cried out in warning.

Whirling just as Waits-by-the-Water pitched from her saddle onto the frozen ground, the white man darted first to Stiff Arm. “Hold my son,” he croaked with dread. “His … his mother—”

At her side Bass slowly rolled the woman over, pulled her across his lap, cradling her head against his chest. Gazing into his wife’s eyes, he yanked off his mitten, then laid his callused fingertips to her brow.

“I have the fire of this terrible death burning in me,” she whispered. “Now I will die.”

“No … no you won’t,” he sobbed.

“Leave me here—”

“I can’t do that.”

“Our children, they must not see me die,” she pleaded.

For a long moment Scratch peered at Magpie, silently watching the child’s terrified eyes. Gently he started to pull his legs from under the woman’s shoulders as he said, “I will tell her, then send the others away, back to the village while I stay with you.”

“You must go with the children, to care for Magpie and—”

“I will be at your side while you are sick,” he whispered against her ear, “just as I promised I would be at your brother’s side.”

“The others, they will take our children?” she asked weakly.

“Yes, Pretty On Top, the others, they will care for our children until we can come for them.”

“Tell Magpie I love her.”

Bass stood, quickly moving across the crusty snow to the horsemen. “Stiff Arm, you must go on without us.”

His eyes were heavy with concern. “You are staying till your wife dies?”

“She will get better, then we will come,” Bass said angrily.

Pretty On Top clearly read the frustration and anger in the white man’s face. “We will go back to our village, and wait for you to return.”

Gratitude filled Bass’s eyes when he gazed up at his young friend. “My children—take them both to Crane. She and Bright Wings will watch over the children until their mother and I rejoin you.”

“The children will be safe with us,” Pretty On Top vowed.

Taking a step backward, Bass’s eyes touched the front ranks of those horsemen, then he went to Magpie’s knee.

“Popo?” she whimpered, still frightened.

“Your mother is too weak to ride now,” he comforted, stroking the girl’s blanket legging. “We will come to be with you soon. Stay with your grandmother and your aunt. Help care for Flea as your mother knows you can. She will rejoin you both very soon.”

“How long, popo?”

Swallowing, he did not want to lie to his child again as he had in the blizzard. But in matters of life … and death, he would. “We will be coming right behind you. Magpie, do not be afraid now—because you are with those who will protect you, care for you. For your mother’s sake … remember to take care of your little brother, always.”

“Until you come back to us?” she asked plaintively.

“Take care of him always.”

She sobbed, “You will come back?”

“Yes,” he promised. Then reached up to pull her face down to his. Bass kissed the little girl on the cheek. “You will see me soon.”

Stepping aside to Stiff Arm’s pony, the trapper pulled back the blanket flaps and kissed his son’s forehead. Looking up at the warrior, he whispered, “If I do not return, you will see that my son is raised to become a warrior like the rest of his people—like his uncle, and his grandfather?”

“Your son is Crow,” Stiff Arm said. “But he will always know of the good American who was his father.”

Slowly taking three steps back, Bass waved to Magpie. “Go now—all of you. While you have so much of the day left for your journey.”

Most of the warriors gave some signal to the trapper as they turned their ponies away and started back up to the pass, but not one of the horsemen uttered another word as the animals snorted, their unshod hooves crunching across the icy snow glaring with the day’s new light as the wind soughed through the heaving boughs of wind-gnarled cedar and spruce.

He listened to the sound of those hooves disappear as he held his wife, gently rocking her against him while the sun flooded across that timbered slope.

Later, when it grew quiet but for the wind in the trees, Waits-by-the-Water asked, “My children?”

“They will be safe,” he promised her. “The others are taking them back to the village.”

“He-Who-Is-No-Longer-With-Us?”

He cleared his throat and said, “They will put him on a warrior’s scaffold, to honor him before his family and the rest of his people.”

“I know this sickness will not kill you,” she said softly. “It comes from the white man … so the white man won’t die.”

“Many, many of my people still die—”

“No,” she cut off his words. “You must promise me our children will not die because they were born with white blood in their bodies.”

Her eyes implored him so, their hollow, teary recesses begging him for reassurance. Bass realized he had already lied to his daughter in matters of life and death. So he would lie to her too.

“Yes. You are right. Our children will be safe.”

“The white man just grows sick for a time before he gets better,” she whispered some of the words he had told her long ago. “But the white man does not die.”

“He gets better,” Bass vowed. “Just as you will grow better.”

“Take me away from the fire,” she begged, clearly growing weaker.

Placing his hand against her neck, Titus felt the fury of her fever in his fingertips. “I will move you away from the fire so you can rest while I make camp.”

She closed her eyes. “Bring me some water soon?”

“Yes. I will be back with some water, soon.”

Gently pulling himself away from his wife, Bass got to his feet to peer up the rugged slope of scree and loose gray talus toward the pass. Squinting in the glare of the reflected sunlight, he watched the tiny dark column snaking its way toward the open saddle far above him.

Gazing down at his wife who lay at his feet, Scratch turned and started toward the trees for firewood to melt snow into water. He moved away quickly now.

He did not want her to hear him crying.

Bass swatted at the mosquito, then rubbed a fingertip across the tiny red bump raised on the back of his walnut-brown hand. “I don’t figger them Blackfeets gonna bother nary Americans no more.”

Unfolding his big kerchief of black silk, old friend Elbridge Gray wiped sweat from his forehead and the ridge of his round bulb of a nose more pocked with tiny blue veins every year. “Come spring, we run across more’n one camp of them bastards. Lodges filled with dead’uns getting picked over by the jays, bones getting dragged off by the wolves. Bridger figgers what Blackfoot ain’t been kill’t off by the pox gonna be cowed but good. Won’t dare make trouble for us now.”

With a sigh Scratch nodded. “Ain’t like it was afore, Elbridge. Bug’s Boys ain’t the fearsome bunch no more.”

“For sartin the Blackfoot country’s open to Americans now,” Rufus Graham added, hissing his s’s between those four missing front teeth, two top and two bottom. Then he glanced self-consciously at the woman who sat nearby cutting moccasin soles from the thick neck hide of a buffalo robe. “After you and your wife rubbed up ag’in’ them
Blackfoot what had the smallpox … how you two ever come out by the skin of your teeth?”

Titus didn’t answer for a hot, still moment, watching the woman at work over her hide. She must have felt his gaze, for she turned to glance at him for but an instant before she smiled and resumed her work.

For the longest time now she had refused to let others look at her, hiding her face beneath the hood of her capote, even as spring warmed the land and dispelled all evidence of winter. It wasn’t until early in that second summer after healing from the pox that she had relented and no longer kept her face in the shadow—about the time they started south from Absaroka for this rendezvous on the Green.

For more than a year and a half Waits-by-the-Water had lived her life all but hiding out each day. Ashamed of how the disease had ravaged her face, the woman rarely emerged from her sister-in-law’s lodge until twilight. If she did venture out to scrape hides or gather wood and water, Waits tied one of Bass’s large black silk kerchiefs just below her eyes, covering most of her disfigurement. It wasn’t until Crane died late in the spring of 1839 that Waits heeded the praise of others, finally coming to believe that somehow she really was, in a most tangible way, a heroine to her people.

She had survived—not only the brutal capture and abuse of an ancient enemy—but Waits-by-the-Water had endured the slow, cruel torture, and what should have been the sure death demanded by the pox.

“The men of your tribe, they are proud of their sacrifice scars, yes?” Bass asked her, tapping a finger against his own breast to indicate the sun-dance torture.

Waits had nodded her head in the firelight of the lodge where she and the children stayed with Strikes-in-Camp’s family while Titus was gone trapping in the hills for days at a time.

“And the Crow men,” he had continued, “they proudly mark their war wounds with vermilion paint—showing everyone just how brave they were, how great
their courage to bear up in the face of death?” Titus waited for her to nod again.

“Yes.”

“To your people you are just as brave as a warrior. You faced death but did not die. Wife, you do not have to paint a red war circle around a bullet pucker, a knife scar, or a hole made by an arrow shaft. The great battle you waged against the terrible sickness is a battle none of your people ever win. In your victory that battle has marked you with its scars that show you were every bit as brave as a Crow warrior.”

Even though she began venturing out in the day without her black silk kerchief, Titus knew how frightened she had to be—afraid of what other Crow would say or ask when they saw her, afraid more of those who wouldn’t say a thing about her face but would instead look upon her with disgust or revulsion—worse yet, pity. The deep scars had marked her cheeks, pitted her forehead and nose.

Yet Waits-by-the-Water’s battle with the disease had left her scarred far deeper than the surface of her skin. She had healed from the scourge. Eventually she had begun to live again without hiding her face. But this woman would be a long time in healing the inner wounds.

“I never come down with the pox,” Bass explained to that dwindling circle of old friends gathered with him at that rendezvous near the mouth of Horse Creek on the Green River. “Only way I figger the woman come through it … maybeso God Hisself knowed how much we needed her.”