Wind Walker (56 page)

“Enough, woman,” he chided her. “Jackrabbit, take your
mother with you over there to the shade.” Then he turned back to his wife, saying, “I’ll let you put everything away when we have the lodge staked down for you. Now go sit with the boy.”

By the time they had the cover pinned against the poles, the air had grown warm—especially when the breeze gasped and died. So they could avoid the strong sulfurous odors of the gurgling springs, he had made camp upwind of the steamy pools, where shallow pools of hot water collected on a series of terraces. On downwind from them stood a tall cone composed entirely of minerals deposited over the eons by a single spewing spring, one microscopic layer after another. As he began to drag the baggage off the packhorses, Scratch had Magpie and Flea roll up the bottom of the lodge cover so the light breeze could move through the shady lodge.

“Now it’s time to take the horses to the crik,” he instructed his eldest son. “Water them good, much as they wanna drink. We don’t need to worry ’bout them gettin’ too much because we’ll be stayin’ put for two nights.”

“Do you want me to picket the horses when I am done watering them?” he asked. “Or, do you want me to let them wander?”

“They should be awright on their own,” Titus replied. “Let ’em find the grass they want to eat by themselves.”

What plants grew in this narrow valley not only tasted good but were highly nutritious, fed by the mineral-rich waters beneath the soil. It was clear to see from the many tracks and well-used trails crisscrossing their camping ground that the nourishing and flavorful vegetation attracted both deer and antelope to this valley too. As Flea moved off, herding the horses before him, Scratch considered taking the boy hunting at first light the next morning, when the game was moving out of their beds and down toward water. Yes, this would be a good place to lay over for a few days, he thought as he dropped to the grass in a patch of shade near the lodge, watching Waits and Magpie dragging their few belongings through the lodge door.

“Jackrabbit! Come over here to your father!” he called out in Crow.

The boy clambered into his lap and sat.

“You stay here with me,” he told his son. “Where you won’t be in the way of those women. Always best for a man to stand back and stay completely out of the way when a woman is at work. This is a good lesson for a boy to learn.”

As Jackrabbit slid off his father’s lap and laid his head down on Titus’s thigh, Scratch leaned back against a tree and closed his eyes.

Here at the springs they were more than halfway to the Yellowstone from Bridger’s post. They could afford to rest here before they marched on to find Yellow Belly’s Crow, who wouldn’t cross the Yellowstone and start south until the weather began to cool. Until then, the hunting bands would stay north, perhaps as far away as the Judith or the Musselshell, on the prowl for buffalo and wary of the Blackfoot. Time enough to be pushing on before the cold arrived. For now the second summer was hanging on—

“Popo!” Flea called excitedly as he rode up on the bare back of his claybank.

Titus immediately came out of his sleep, raising Jackrabbit’s head as he started to slip out from under the small boy. Magpie and Waits sat in the shade of the lodge cover, watching. “Trouble?” he asked.

Flea watched his father reach around for the rifle he had propped against the tree. “No trouble … I think.”

“What did you wake me up for?” He blinked as he stepped into the intense sunlight.

“Someone is staying near the creek.”

Alarm troubled his belly. “Indian?”

His head bobbed. “But they have no lodge. Only a small shelter made of branches and blankets.”

“How many?” he asked as he came to his son’s knee. A branch-and-blanket shelter sounded like a war lodge, a horse-stealing party on its way into enemy country.

“I don’t think there are many of them. I only saw three horses grazing nearby.”

“Did anyone see you?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t think so, but I’m not sure.”

“How did you find this shelter?”

He patted the claybank beneath him. “I heard a horse whistle. My pony heard it too and asked me if we should go see. I thought we should go because we didn’t know anyone else was camped close to us.”

“You were careful?” he asked, then whistled low for the dogs. “Did you see if you were followed?”

Flea nodded. “I watched my back trail carefully.”

“Where is this shelter and the three horses?”

Turning to point as the two dogs bounded out of the brush, the boy said, “Over that low ridge, where the stream makes a slow circle at the base of the hill.”

“Our horses are safe?”

“Yes, Popo. I brought them back from the water and put them out to graze on the other side of that willow.”

He looked downstream at the bottom of the hill where the sun glared brightly on the rustling leaves. “I see them now. Good. Magpie?”

She poked her head from the lodge. “You need me?”

“Come help me tie up the dogs so they will stay here with you and your mother.”

When Ghost and Digger were secured at the ends of their tethers, and he had knotted a bandanna around each muzzle to keep them quiet, Scratch turned to his son and asked, “Flea, can you take me to look at this shelter you found?”

“Come up with me and I will take you.” The boy patted the back of his horse.

Titus retrieved two pistols and stuffed them in his belt before he handed his son the rifle, then bounded onto the rear flanks of the claybank pony. Once he had scooted forward against the boy, Scratch took back his rifle. He looped his left arm around Flea’s waist and said, “Let’s go see who these strangers are.”

They left the claybank tied in a clump of alder, then scrambled up the side of the hill at an angle. Scratch followed his
boy to just below the top, then they both dropped to their bellies and crawled on up to the crest. At the top he peered down at the narrow creek, unable to find the shelter at first. Eventually he spotted a patch of what looked to be greasy, smoke-darkened canvas in the midst of a large stand of eight-foot-tall willow.

“Where are the three horses?” he whispered.

“On the other side,” Flea said. “You come around the hill, that way, and you see them.”

“Tied up?”

He nodded. “Long ropes.”

“Saddles?”

This time Flea shook his head. “I saw no saddles. White man or Indian.”

“But you saw the horses, son. What tribe are these strangers?”

“Don’t know, Popo.”

“Any weapons hanging outside?” he asked. “Shield or medicine bundle?”

“No. I saw nothing.” He grew thoughtful a moment, then told his father, “It is a poor camp, no signs of wealth. Maybe we leave them alone, and they won’t bother us too.”

“Can’t take that chance, Rea. With us camped just over the hill at the springs, these strangers are too close. Best to know who your neighbors are.”

Titus slid backward, then rolled onto his hip and sat up, pulling the first pistol from his belt. Handing it to the boy, he said, “Here. You know how to use this if you need to?”

“I remember.”

“Good. I want you at my back when we walk in there.”

When they reached the bank of the narrow creek opposite the shelter, Bass saw how much thought had gone into placing the structure where it was all but concealed, except from straight on. It had all the signs of an old camp: footpaths tracking upstream and down, all the grass around the stand of willow trampled by moccasins if not hooves, and a small portion of the sharp cutbank worn down by the strangers as they knelt while dipping water from the stream. He was
certain this wasn’t a war lodge—a shelter hastily constructed for one night’s sleep as a war party walked or rode deep into enemy country. No, from the signs of things, this trio of strangers had been here for some time and didn’t appear to be in a rush to leave.

“We’ll wait here and see how many are inside,” he whispered to the boy. “If all three strangers are here, I will need to send you back for your bow. But if only one of them sleeps inside, we are in no danger with our three guns.”

“We just wait?”

He looked at his son. “Patience is something good for all young men to learn.”

Minutes later Flea whispered close to his father’s ear, “Were you very different from me when you were my age?”

Grinning, he tousled his son’s long, black hair and said, “Boys are the same, no matter where they grow up, no matter if they Crow like you, or a white boy like I was.”

“Sometimes I think that I will never grow up to be as good a man as you,” Flea confessed.

“That’s where you are wrong,” he said in a hush, deeply touched by the honor in his son’s words.

In exasperation, the boy said, “But you know all these things that I don’t think I ever will know.”

“I suppose I make you feel that way because I try to teach you all that I have learned—to help you understand all those things I did not understand. I want to give you my hand in growing into a man, the help that I did not have. So, I am sorry if I have not been a good and gentle father to you. Sorry if I tell you that you should learn patience … then I am not patient with you myself.”

“You have been a very good father,” Flea responded, his eyes filled with respect. “Maybe there are times when it is hard to be my father.”

Laying his hand on the boy’s shoulder, Titus whispered, “I will try better to remember that there are times it is difficult to be my son—”

“Look!” Flea whispered harshly.

A shadowy form appeared at the shelter’s low doorway,
bent at the waist and knees, as the stranger stepped into a patch of shade and stood. A woman!

She straightened and shook her clothes around her—a long leather skirt that fell just below her knees and an ill-fitting cloth shirt once of a bright calico pattern, but now so crusted with grime and fire soot that it was hard for Titus to make out what color it had ever been. She wore no moccasins, her feet coated with a thick layer of ground-in dirt. She pushed back her unkempt hair and began to brush at it with a porcupine tail that had its quills clipped short, slowly and painfully yanking at the ratty knots, beginning to shake loose the bits of grass and ash that had collected there. She was not a young thing, he could see. Her hair hung well flecked with the snows of something more than forty winters, and her breasts sagged with not only the pull of age but the mouths of babes who had suckled at them what had to be a lifetime ago.

Perhaps there was a child inside that shelter; if not a child, then a youngster not quite become an adult—

A second figure stepped from the dark interior and emerged clumsily, one hand clutching onto the left side of the shelter to steady himself. Barechested, his legs naked as well, and not wearing any moccasins, the man tugged at his long breechclout, straightening it on the narrow strap of leather tied around his waist, then adjusting his manhood beneath the front fold of what had once been a bright red piece of trader’s wool. The bright colors of selvage at the edges of the breechclout were faded, frayed, and almost indistinguishable with soot and filth. He rubbed the heels of both palms into his eyes, then spread his fingers apart to push back what unruly sprigs of his graying hair had refused to stay bound within his long braids also dusted with flecks of dried grass.

“Where is the third one?” Flea asked. “Inside?”

“Wait, and we will see.”

The woman walked to the edge of the bushes, past the ground where the three horses raised their heads and followed her toward the hillside. There she yanked up the bottom of her short skirt, one side after another, raising it to her
hips, then squatted and moistened the ground, unaware of the father and son across that narrow ribbon of water. When she stood, shifting the skirt back around her legs, and started back to the shelter, the three horses remained near the bottom of the hill to crop at the grass.

Quietly lifting the flap to his shooting pouch, Bass pulled out the spyglass and snapped out its three sections. He quickly looked over those three animals, inspecting their muzzles, manes, backs, and tails. These were not the proud possessions of a warrior: groomed, painted, a tail bound up for battle. All three showed their age, and two of them clearly had healing sores on their backs from an ill-fitting saddle. Slowly he dragged the spyglass across to his left, hoping to get himself a better look at these two aging and disheveled strangers.

He stopped first on the woman as she took down from a tree branch two small carcasses he had not noticed hanging there before. Rabbits; gutted, but unskinned. Plopping them beside a lifeless fire pit, she bent over the game and picked up a small knife, using it to slowly work the hide off the meat. As she squatted over those rabbits, Scratch studied her—unable to make out what tribe she was from her manner of dress or decorations. But he could only assume these two had to be Shoshone. This was, after all, near the northern border of Snake country, but close to the southern extent of Crow land as well. Still, in the absence of lodge symbols, pony paintings, or distinguishable hairstyles, Titus could only guess the couple had to be Shoshone.

When he inched the spyglass on to the left and found the man settling onto the trampled grass, Bass twisted the sections of the tube together until he brought the stranger’s face into sharper focus. The man leaned back on his elbows in the shade and closed his eyes as if relishing that particular moment. He spoke to the woman without looking at her or opening his eyes. The sound of his voice drifted across the creek to the rocks and willow where Bass and Flea lay in hiding, pricking a remembrance, perhaps even a warning, at the top of Scratch’s spine, there at the base of his skull. He
held the spyglass as steady as he could, concentrating on that aging face. It had been so long, so very long, that he could not be certain … because the last time he had laid eyes on the man was more than—how many now? More than fourteen winters ago. How the years had taken a toll on the old warrior.

“I know him,” Titus whispered, not taking the spyglass from his right eye.

“The man?” Flea asked.

As Scratch watched him through the spyglass, the man’s eyes suddenly popped open and he gazed intently across the narrow creek, slowly turning his head as he studied the base of the hill where Bass and his son lay in hiding. It was clear the warrior had heard something of the unseen spies. He spoke to the woman, and she looked up, peering across the creek too as she wearily got to her feet. The man slid his legs under him and stood, backing toward the shelter as the woman hurried behind him, quickly ducking through the low opening. In a moment her arm appeared again, handing out an old trade gun to the man. Just before Bass took the spyglass from his eye, he saw how poor a weapon the firearm was—repaired with rawhide wraps at both the wrist right behind the lock, and again along the forestock, just in front of the rear sight. Both crude repairs clearly showing signs of age.