Ride the Moon Down (9 page)

With a smile Scratch said, “Take her clothes off.”

“That isn’t what is going to make her happy.”

“As we offer our daughter to the Grandfather,” he explained, “she should be as naked as the day she came to be with us.”

Without a word of protest, Waits-by-the-Water released the knots in the soft strips of antelope hide that secured the sections of cloth around the child’s body. First that strip under the babe’s arms, then the one around its
belly. And finally those that held absorbent grass stalks around the infant’s legs. With a dry scrap of wool, Waits quickly wiped her daughter’s bare bottom, then handed the squirming bundle over to Bass.

Completely dark beyond that small corona of firelight, hemmed in by a great encompassing wilderness where no sound was heard save for the yonder call of the mournful song-dogs, the quieting buzz of insects among the rustling leaves, and that muted babble of the nearby creek—Bass laid her tiny head in the palm of his left hand, stretching her little, lithe body along that forearm so that a leg fell on either side of his elbow. With the fingertips of his right hand, he gently caressed her forehead, cheeks, and under her chin, slowly soothing the fussy child, quieting her. Down each arm he lightly rubbed, fingertips pressing softly as he progressed.

When he looked up at Waits, he found admiration in his wife’s beautiful black-cherry eyes. Then he gazed down at his daughter once more and continued massaging her plump little body while he whispered to her the nonsense that makes no difference to an infant who knows only that she is the center of her own universe at that moment. Down each hip and on down each leg, Titus didn’t finish until he had gently rubbed every small toe.

He raised her head, and kissed the tiny brow, watching the babe’s wide, wondering eyes roll upward as he lowered his hairy face toward her. Then Bass clutched the infant in his two strong hands and slowly raised her above his head until his arms were outstretched. She began to squirm again, her legs kicking, arms pumping, fists flailing in discontent, a little brown-skinned ball of anger at the end of his arms, held here against the black sky in the fire’s light, her flesh lit red as Mexican copper.

“We honor this gift you have given the two of us, First Maker!” he said now.

“This little one who you knew would make a place for herself in our hearts.”

Slowly, the baby slowed her leg’s gyrations, quieted her fussing.

“You gave this little one her name at the very beginning—even
from the start of time … and you have waited for us to discover her name for ourselves.”

The child cooed, reaching for those sparks that spiraled upward from the flames leaping inches from Bass’s knees. Then he realized his daughter was no longer trying to catch the daring, dancing sparks. Instead she reached for those twinkling bits of light just beyond her reach, those stars flung against the blackened backdrop.

“Help us protect her, to raise her right, strong, and straight. Help us to teach her to know you,” he said, feeling the first tear spill from his brimming eyes.

The infant was talking again, not chattering at her father, but babbling at those flecks of light in the sky above her. Just beyond her reach.

“We know she is our child for only a short time, Grandfather. We know you have been so kind to part with her while she comes to us for a short time. Help us both to see that she walks the right trail. And help us to make her happy.”

At the end of his arms the babe stretched out her arms again and again, flexing her tiny, pudgy fingers, trying to scoop up the glittering specks of brilliant light as her happy, constant chatter grew all the bolder.

“So you have told me her name,” Bass said, both eyes streaming now as he gazed upon his daughter. “We ask your blessings on this child who will be called … Magpie.”

Quickly he looked over at his wife. Tears suddenly spilled from her eyes too as she brought the fingertips of both hands to her lips, smiling and sobbing at the same time. Waits nodded to him, then looked at their daughter there above them both in the copper firelight.

Past the happy sob clogging her throat, Waits-by-the-Water pushed the word, “M-magpie.”

“Magpie,” Bass repeated as he lowered the babe into his wife’s arms, “this little talking one called Magpie has come to be with us for a while.”

As they followed Ham’s Fork down to its mouth to depart the valley, Bass had kept his pony close to Waits’s
horse. The rendezvous site was crowded with coyotes, a few lanky-legged wolves, and flocks of big-winged, wrinkled-necked buzzards flapping and cawing out of the sky all around them.

Zeke strained at the length of rope tied round his neck, yanking on the strong hand that restrained him as Titus led them east. “Easy, boy. Easy.”

From far and wide, what had called in those predators was the stench.

Those streamside camps once filled with over six hundred white men along with some three-times-that-many Indians was making for quite a feast of carrion. Several snarling wolves or angry, flapping, snapping vultures clustered around every butchered carcass or gut-pile left behind. So bold had these predators become with their feasting that the sound of the horses’ approach did not drive off the four-legged and birds, much less the sight of those horses and humans as Scratch took his family past the refuse of each of Rocky Mountain Fur’s progressive camps, Wyeth’s camp, and finally what had been American Fur’s camp where Ham’s Fork poured into Black’s Fork.

It was good, he thought, so good to leave that place where so many had crowded together with all their noise. That place of grass trampled beneath so many moccasins and hooves, what grass hadn’t been cropped and chewed by the thousands of horses. But given a winter to lie fallow beneath the snows of this high, arid country, those meadows along the creek would cloak themselves in a thick coat of green come spring’s torrents.

How much he had been looking forward to their return to Absaroka.

All the memories flooded together as they crossed the Green and made for the southern end of the Wind River Mountains where they climbed up the west side of the southern pass and crossed over to the Sweetwater before striking due north for the Popo Agie, following it as they rose into the eastern slopes of the mountains.

For several weeks they leisurely clung to the high country, working their way north by west through the rugged
Wind River Range until they reached the country where the passes either carried them west to Davy Jackson’s Hole, or north into the forbidding fastness of the hulking Absaroka Range. Instead they turned southeast around the end of those mighty hills and made for the Owl Mountains.

For another month he had them mosey north along the foothills of the Absaroka Range, stopping to camp for a night or two along every stream where they found the beaver active, at the edge of every flooded meadow where the flat-tails had erected their dams and lodges, felling their trees and raising their young.

Before leaving camp for his traplines each morning, Bass freshly primed a pair of smoothbore fusils and their two extra rifles, along with a brace of pistols, leaving them propped here and there against their shelter, or astride beaver packs—somewhere easily within her reach. Besides those usual chores of tending to the baby’s needs, bringing in firewood, making repairs to moccasins and clothing, or preparing meals for her ravenous husband, Waits-by-the-Water again proved herself an invaluable camp keeper by expertly fleshing every beaver hide he dragged in, cleaning it of fat and excess connective tissue after Scratch pulled the heavy green hide off the carcass at streamside. Last fall in the Bayou Salade he had taught her how to lash the green hide inside a large willow hoop, threading a long rawhide whang round and round as she stretched the beaver skin to dry.

At most camps they snuffed their fire by twilight and warily slept out the night in a darkness that made those autumn nights feel all the colder. As sociable as the horses were, as gregarious as was young Samantha—Bass figured it was nonetheless far better that he picket each animal in a separate place from dusk’s deepening till dawn’s first light. If some thieving redskins happened to stumble across them, far better was it to lose one or two than to have the whole bunch driven off together. Better to count those horses’ ribs than to count their tracks.

As soon as Magpie was sleeping soundly on the far side of her mother, lying close at hand for those times
when the child awoke hungry during the night, and Waits-by-the-Water was nestled beneath their blankets, Titus always slipped quietly into the frosty darkness. One by one he made the rounds, checking on the horses, then the mule, before bringing the buffalo pony with the spotted rump right into camp. Dropping a loop of rawhide rope around its head, Scratch played out the rest of the rope as he settled back among the blankets and robes with his wife and child. After tucking the end of the rope securely beneath his belt, the trapper could finally close his eyes, assured that he would be jolted awake with the pony’s slightest tug on the rawhide rope as it grazed through the night.

A man who wanted to keep what he had left of his hair, who wanted to protect his family, didn’t much worry about sleeping out his nights in peace. He could sleep the night through come next summer’s rendezvous, or come this winter with the Crow. No man long in tooth, be he white or red, ever let a little thing like some lost sleep nettle him.

Better to awaken after a few hours of sleep in fits and starts than not awaken at all.

If it wasn’t Magpie fussing with an empty belly, or Samantha snorting to announce she had just winded some nocturnal animal like a raccoon, skunk, or porcupine, that awakened him, most times the trapper would come to, suddenly aware of some seminal change in the nightsounds drifting around their camp—even if it were nothing more than the rustle of an owl’s wings as it prowled on the hunt through the branches overhead or a change in the wind’s pitch as it soughed on down the valley below them. Season after season, the senses of those who hadn’t gone under became honed more finely, polished to clarity, become virtually instinctual.

Too many times in these last nine years he had simply reacted, not given the luxury of a moment to plan, to consider and reflect on what course to take. Here he was alive after so many had tried to kill him simply because Bass had absorbed the virtual wildness of this wilderness. The
way of those beasts around him, that survival of the quickest, the most wary, those most cunning.

He had survived in this wilderness where lesser men were swallowed up simply because he had become wild enough to reach across that gulf between man and beast.

They had autumn beaver, a damned good start on what prime pelts he’d trap come spring. Maybe even do this winter what he hadn’t done in recent years—slip off for days at a time and search out those high country meadows and dammed streams where the beaver were laying out their winter safely burrowed in their lodges. A man could bust open the tops of those lodges, then shoot or spear the big flat-tails he caught inside. But those efforts always left a trapper with furs something less than prime—punctured by a gaping hole or two. Something that would pare down the price of his plews come rendezvous next summer.

And with what he had seen of the high cost of necessaries coupled with the slide in the dollar that a man’s beaver could bring, Titus Bass didn’t figure he could chance anything else robbing him of what prime he had left among his plews.

South of the Yellowstone River where the Crow would winter, down toward the Stinking Water around that region the trappers called Colter’s Hell, he was sure he could run onto some creeks and streams fed by warming springs, even those wider rivers where the banks bore plenty of beaver sign plain as paint and the water remained open throughout the cold months. A week of hard work here, and a week there, returning to the Crow camp to turn his hides over to his woman, nestle himself down in the robes with her naked, full-breasted warmth for a few days before he would set out again in search of another stretch of winter trapping.

Sure sounded like it had the makings of some fine winter doings. He’d revisit his old friends among the Crow, stay off and on with Waits-by-the-Water and his in-laws … but when he got that old itch to be on the tramp again, why—he could pack up a mess of dried meat
and pemmican before heading south with Samantha in search of brown gold.

“Husband,” she called out, the word catching in her throat.

She had seen the smoke a heartbeat before he spotted it. Down the slope to their left, rising among the last few leaves still clinging to those cottonwood branches—faint spirals of wood smoke. Bass imagined he could already smell its fragrance like a wispy perfume on the cold autumn wind gusting along the ground, kicking up icy streamers across the top of the most recent dusting of snow.

“They are camped right where we believed we would find them,” he said with a smile. “Let’s ride on down there and show your family this little girl of ours.”

Arapooesh was dead.

It slapped him with the same brutality he had experienced in losing Ebenezer Zane, Mad Jack Hatcher, even the canny old preacher Asa McAfferty.